The early disease screening has served as a major means for disease control, which is the universal consensus in the neoplastic disease field. Nowadays, screening out patients with cancers in their early stage is the ultimate goal in the bioengineering and pharmaceutical industry. A biotechnology company named “Grail” recently announced that they would carry on the series B financing for 1 billion USD to develop relevant liquid biopsy technology. Grail identified the need of urgent improvement in current tumor screening so as to raise an enormous amount of money. Besides, Grail is a company spun off from famous sequencing giant Illumina 1 year ago.

Grail mainly concentrates on early tumor screening with liquid biopsy technique. Liquid biopsy is usually used to provide guidance for the program design of some disease treatments. However, Grail believes that this technology can act a more important role in disease screening.

Grail said that this round of financing would be completed by the first quarter of 2017 and they would develop the methods for tumor screening based on blood samples with this fund. Board chairman Jay Flatley expressed that a series of clinical researches would be carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of this technology. One research intends to recruit 10,000 volunteers and analyze the differences among correlative gene signals in different stages of tumor development by screening different types of tumors with the liquid biopsy technology.

Before this, the company had closed its series A financing that has reached 100 million USD, most of which is from some Bill Gates-class investors and institutions. The company will bring in numerous venture capital institutions in the future, thus the share proportion of Illumina, the previous employer of Grail, may drop to below 20%. However, Grail is likely to become one of the major clients of Illumina in the future.