GRAIL, Inc., announced on 5/21/18 that it has raised USD$300 million in an oversubscribed Series C financing. The financing is led by Ally Bridge Group, co-led by Hillhouse Capital Group and 6 Dimensions Capital, and includes Blue Pool Capital, China Merchant Securities International, CRF Investment, HuangPu River Capital (HPR), ICBC International, Sequoia Capital China, and WuXi NextCODE.
Since early 2016, GRAIL has raised more than $1.5 billion in three rounds of equity financing to pursue its vision of transforming the way cancer is diagnosed and reducing global cancer mortality. The Series C funding will add to the company’s balance sheet and support ongoing development and validation of products for the early detection of cancer in GRAIL’s clinical research program.
“GRAIL has continued to execute at a rapid pace towards its goal of saving lives through early detection of cancer. We have enrolled more than 73,000 participants in our population-scale clinical studies, CCGA and STRIVE, and are on-track to complete enrollment in both studies this year,” said Jennifer Cook, Chief Executive Officer of GRAIL. “We recently reported data supporting the potential for development of a highly specific and sensitive blood test, and are now continuing our development programs to optimize and validate a product for early detection of multiple cancer types.”
Ms Cook joined the company in December of 2017. She was previously head of Clinical Operations in Product Development for Roche Pharmaceuticals, managing a clinical trial portfolio of more than 400 trials with 100,000 participants.
GRAIL is using the power of high-intensity sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and state-of-the-art computer science and data science to enhance the scientific understanding of cancer biology, and to develop and commercialize pioneering products for the early detection of cancer.
GRAIL is conducting what the company believes to be one of the largest clinical research programs ever pursued in genomic medicine in collaboration with leading community and academic medical centers globally. GRAIL has initiated two large-scale studies to date, which are designed to characterize the landscape of cancer-defining cell-free nucleic acid profiles, and to develop and validate blood tests for the early detection of multiple cancer types. The Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas (CCGA) Study is a prospective, observational, longitudinal study enrolling more than 15,000 people with and without cancer. The STRIVE Study is a prospective, observational, longitudinal, cohort study enrolling 120,000 women at the time of their screening mammogram.