By Diagnostics World Staff
March 1, 2017 | GRAIL today announced that it has raised over $900 million through the first close of its previously announced Series B financing, which was led by ARCH Venture Partners, and includes Johnson & Johnson Innovation as the largest investor in the financing. The initial close also includes world-class strategic pharmaceutical, technology, and financial investors. GRAIL anticipates a second close, with Goldman, Sachs & Co. acting as a placement agent, that will include additional institutional investors globally.
“We envision a global community that benefits from early-stage cancer detection where fewer individuals face the anguish of late-stage diagnosis and devastating outcomes,” wrote Jeff Huber, GRAIL’s Chief Executive Officer. “I believe that GRAIL’s approach leveraging high-intensity sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and state of the art Computer Science and Data Science is unparalleled in the field of cancer detection. Our team made tremendous progress in 2016 and I look forward to additional clinical and strategic milestones.”
GRAIL will use the proceeds of the financing for continued product development and validation of blood tests for early-stage cancer detection, including the previously announced Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas (CCGA) study and other large-scale clinical trials that are expected to enroll hundreds of thousands of patients. The CCGA study will characterize the landscape of cell-free DNA profiles in individuals with cancer and in healthy non-cancer participants using GRAIL’s high-intensity (ultra-broad and ultra-deep) sequencing approach, leveraging Illumina sequencing technology. Some of the proceeds were used to repurchase a portion of Illumina’s stake in GRAIL such that Illumina now owns slightly less than 20 percent of the Company.
In addition to ARCH Venture Partners and Johnson & Johnson Innovation, the investors participating in the first close include Amazon, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, McKesson Ventures, Merck (MSD), Tencent Holdings Limited, and Varian Medical Systems, GRAIL intends to close the remainder of the Series B investment prior to the end of the first quarter of 2017 from qualified investors.