Grail, the Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) spinout that merged last year with China’s Cirina, has raised an additional $300 million to advance its ambitious quest to develop a blood test sensitive enough to detect cancer.
The Hong Kong-based Ally Bridge Group led the Series C financing round, which brings total funding for Grail to more than $1.5 billion since early 2016, according to a statement Monday. Other investors identified by the company in the round are Hillhouse Capital Group, 6 Dimensions Capital, Blue Pool Capital, China Merchant Securities International, CRF Investment, HuangPu River Capital, ICBC International, Sequoia Capital China, and WuXi NextCODE.
The cash infusion comes a little more than a year after Grail raised $900 million in a Series B round of financing. Grail said the new funding would be used to bolster the company’s balance sheet and support ongoing development and validation of its blood test for early detection of cancer. Grail said it has enrolled more than 73,000 patients in two large-scale clinical studies, which are both on track to complete enrollment this year.
Pancreatic cancer cells, image from National Cancer Institute
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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