GRAIL announced that it has completed a $390 million Series D financing round. New investors including Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), and two undisclosed investors joined existing backers including Illumina in this round of funding.
“GRAIL is making significant progress with our blood-based, multi-cancer early detection test,” said GRAIL CEO Hans Bishop. “Nearly 80 percent of cancer deaths result from cancers for which there is no screening test today, and GRAIL’s mission is to change that through the early detection and localization of more than 50 cancers. Enabling this through a single blood draw could improve patient access and adherence to cancer screening and address disparities in cancer care by improving access for rural, vulnerable, and underserved populations. We are delighted that such a high-quality group of investors share our vision and recognize the public health benefits of our technology.”
The Series D funding will support continued development and commercialization of GRAIL’s multi-cancer early detection blood test. Since early 2016, GRAIL has raised more than $1.9 billion in four rounds of equity financing to pursue reducing cancer deaths worldwide through its multi-cancer early detection test.
Clinical data have shown the ability of GRAIL’s blood test to detect more than 50 cancer types with a false positive rate of less than 1 percent. When a cancer signal is detected, the test has been able to identify where in the body the cancer is located with high accuracy, an important step to guiding diagnostic next steps and care.
To do this, GRAIL’s test uses methylation-based technology, which preferentially targets the most informative regions of the genome and is designed to use its proprietary database and machine learning algorithms. GRAIL believes its sequencing database of cancer and non-cancer methylation signatures is the largest of its kind.
Read the original press release here.
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