A company working on methods for early detection of cancers has secured a $300 million Series C funding round.
Grail – which has operations in Menlo Park, California, and Hong Kong – said in a press release Monday evening that it had garnered the funding from a group of investors led by Chinese firms Ally Bridge Group, Hillhouse Capital Group and 6 Dimensions Capital. Additional participants include Blue Pool Capital, China Merchant Securities International, CRF Investment, HuangPu River Capital, ICBC International, Sequoia Capital China and WuXi NextCODE. The latest round brings the total capital raised by Grail to $1.5 billion since 2016, according to the release.
Last March, the company announced it had raised more than $900 million in the first close of a Series B funding round, led by ARCH Venture Partners, with Johnson & Johnson Innovation as the largest investor. Illumina announced the formation of Grail in January 2016 with an initial $100 million Series A funding round, led by Illumina and ARCH, with participation from Jeff Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates and Sutter Hill Ventures.
The company bills its technology as a combination of high-intensity genomic sequencing with data science, enabling the detection of faint signals of circulating tumor DNA. The company is running two studies – STRIVE and CCGA – that include a combined 73,000 patients and are expected to complete this year. The purpose is to create a large dataset to enable the company to demonstrate clinical utility, according to its website.
Company spokesperson Charlotte Arnold said the company is using next-generation sequencing to develop blood tests for early detection of cancer in patients who do not have symptoms or a diagnosis. However, she distinguished Grail’s methods from liquid biopsy, which is used in patients who already have a cancer diagnosis in order to guide treatment or monitor for disease progression.
The company plans to present data from the CCGA study across four different abstracts at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting next month in Chicago. The data suggest that a blood test can be developed to detect multiple tumor types at early stages, the company said in a press release.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
In addition to Illumina, Foundation Medicine and Thermo Fisher have taken leading roles in next-generation sequencing, or NGS. NGS got a boost in March when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in its National Coverage Determination that FDA-approved companion diagnostics using NGS would get full coverage under the two federal insurance programs. The FDA and CMS approved Foundation’s FoundationOne CDx, which tests for 324 genes, and Thermo Fisher’s Oncomine Dx, which tests for 23 genes and 600 DNA and RNA markers in lung cancer.
And ahead of MedCity News’ INVEST conference earlier this month in Chicago, Sarah Hogan – life sciences partner at investment firm McDermott, Will and Emery – discussed three of the most important trends in NGS.
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