Cosmic Log
Grail, a biotech company with early backing from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, says it’s raised $300 million in an oversubscribed Series C financing round. Gates and Bezos got in on a $100 million Series A round in 2016, and since then, total investment has risen to $1.5 billion.
One of the giants of gene sequencing, Illumina, has spun off a new $100 million company called Grail to create an all-in-one blood test for cancer – and its investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
The name reflects the view that such a blood test is a “holy grail” for cancer diagnosis. Grail would use ultra-deep gene sequencing to look for the characteristic nucleic acids that are shed into the blood by tumors. Those traces are known as circulating tumor DNA, or ctDNA.
If the technology is perfected, it could offer a non-invasive way to find out if a patient has cancer well before symptoms appear. That would better the chances for treatment.