Illumina has raised $100 million to detect cancer before it’s too late

How many cancer-related deaths do you think would’ve been avoided if doctors had discovered the cancer sooner? Lots of them, I can assure you. But the problem is, most of the time, doctors only discover that someone has cancer after they start showing symptoms, at which point their chances of survival have probably decreased drastically. That’s where a San Diego-based company by the name of Illumina wants to help. The company claims that it’s developing a new type of blood test that will be able to detect several types of cancer even before symptoms arise for less than $1,000, and it just received $100 million in funding to continue its development. 

The world’s largest DNA sequencing company says it will form a new company to develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise. Illumina, based in San Diego, said its blood tests should reach the market by 2019, and would be offered through doctors’ offices or possibly a network of testing centers. The spin-off’s name, Grail, reflects surging expectations around new types of DNA tests that might do more to defeat cancer than the more than $90 billion spent each year by doctors and hospitals on cancer drugs. Illumina CEO Jay Flatley says he hopes the tests could be a “turning point in the war on cancer.” The startup will be based in San Francisco and has raised more than $100 million from Illumina as well as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos’s venture fund, Bezos Expeditions, and Arch Venture Partners. Illumina will retain majority control. The testing concept being pursued by Illumina, sometimes called a “liquid biopsy,” is to use high-speed DNA sequencing machines to scour a person’s blood for fragments of DNA released by cancer cells. If DNA with cancer-causing mutations is present, it often indicates a tumor is already forming, even if it’s too small to cause symptoms or be seen on an imaging machine.