Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos pour millions into new cancer test

Illumina, the world’s largest manufacturer of DNA sequencing machines, announced Sunday the formation of a new company that will develop blood tests that can detect a broad variety of early-stage cancers long before symptoms arise.

“GRAIL’s promise is to revolutionize screening across all cancer types, using the sensitivity and specificity of next-generation sequencing to create a molecular stethoscope that measures the ultimate cancer biomarker”, Flatley added.

In a conference call with analysts Sunday evening, Illumina CEO Jay Flatley laid out Illumina’s vision for Grail, with clinical trials beginning as early as 2017-with advanced sequencing technology that Illumina transferred to the startup.

This particular blood test for cancer will work to detect many types of cancers and will facilitate the early detection of cancer tumors which can be cured with radiation or minimal surgery.

Pathway Genomics’ screening test claiming to detect 10 cancers in healthy people drew the ire of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) previous year, which sent the company a letter saying the test “had not received adequate clinical validation and may harm the public health”. Illumina, along with another venture capital fund called Arch, has also invested in Grail.

Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flatley, who will serve as chairman of Grail, said work on the new test began some 18 months ago.

San Diego-based Illumina is founding a new company named GRAIL with several other big name other investors, in yet another well-pedigreed effort to develop a blockbuster blood test for detecting, diagnosing and/or informing treatment of cancer.

He thought that the cancer screening landscape is beset with failures. A ctDNA test that can screen for stage 2 cancers such as breast, colon, prostate and ovarian could translate into a $20 billion to $40 billion market, Flatley said. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve said, ‘Oh, all we have to do is find every cancer early and we would solve the problem'”.

Grail hopes that it can prove to the FDA that liquid biopsies are a valid early diagnostic tool. Experts believe that in order to make DNA blood tests a part of routine cancer screening, it would require massive clinical trials to provide that kind of evidence. Some researchers have been investigating so-called circulating tumor cells, or snippets of tumors that break off of cancers and travel through the bloodstream, but they’re still in the development stages.

Cancer is at the second position is list of killers in the United States and its neck to neck with heart disease.

Blood-testing startups were recently dealt a blow after a Wall Street Journal article reported that Theranos, a startup last valued at $9 billion, was not using its proprietary technology to conduct its blood tests.