Illumina Cancer, Universal Cancer Test?

Gates, Bezos invest in cancer blood test - Grail would operate as a separate company, majority owned by Illumina, with more than $100 million in initial funding from a Series A round led by Illumina and Arch Venture Partners. "Illumina's sequencing technology now allows the detection of circulating nucleic acids originating in the cancer cells themselves, a superior approach that provides a direct rather than surrogate measurement". Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates, and Sutter Hill Ventures also invested in Grail.

By enabling the early detection of cancer in asymptomatic individuals through a simple blood screen, we aim to massively decrease cancer mortality by detecting the disease at a curable stage.

Illumina CE Jay Flatley, who will serve as chairman of Grail, said work on the new test began some 18 months ago. Pathway Genomics' screening test claiming to detect 10 cancers in healthy people drew the ire of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration past year, which sent the company a letter saying the test "had not received adequate clinical validation and may harm the public health".

"We've made tremendous progress, which gives us the confidence that we can get to the endpoint that we expect", he said in an interview, believing it will entail at least another year of research and development to refine the test and then another two years for clinical trials.

The new company, called GRAIL, will use its financing to build and scale a CLIA- and CAP-certified sequencing lab applying Illumina's sequencing technology and accessing its latest innovations.

"It may be the case that the test is exactly the same" for targeted cancers as the eventual pan-cancer screening, Flatley said Sunday, answering a GEN question during a conference call with reporters.

He thought that the cancer screening landscape is beset with failures.

Illumina is touted as the only company at present to conduct sequencing at a low-enough cost for further research to be afforded. "And there are millions of lives at stake", Flatley added. If all goes swimmingly, GRAIL could roll out its tests by 2019, Flatley said.

Liquid biopsies aren't a new idea, but only recently has gene-sequencing become affordable enough to make it a viable option to screen at-risk patients, the company says. The liquid biopsies are used to see how well cancer treatment is working.

The more sensitive the test, Flatley said, the larger the potential market for it. That market, he said, could be as large as $20 billion to $40 billion if ctDNA could detect stage 2 across a broad range of cancers-but could grow to more than $100 billion if the tests can detect stage 1 as well as determine tissue of origin.

Interest on cancer blood tests remains on the rise, which investors pitching millions to create them.

It scans the blood streams of patients for signs of cancer DNA, which can indicate that a tumor is forming.

Cancer is the second leading killer in the USA, closely following heart disease. "We are at the gates of a new disruptive technology that could change the way we diagnose and treat cancer", Dr. Baselga said.