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Bezos-Backed Grail Plans Commercial Push on Multi-Cancer Test

Bezos-Backed Grail Plans Commercial Push on Multi-Cancer Test

(Bloomberg) -- Grail, a privately-held company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, will push forward on plans to commercialize a simple blood test meant to find several different kinds of deadly cancers in patients early.

One study, known as the “Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas,” or CCGA, showed that Grail’s liquid biopsy test could find 12 different types of cancers, including colon, breast and lung, at an early stage with a rate of false positives of 1% or less. That’s a key measure of whether patients could be told they have cancer when they don’t.

The test found cancers at early stages 59% to 86% of the time, across different tumor types. The test was also able to identify where in the body a cancer originated 90% of the time.

Results from part of the CCGA study being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology will show that Grail’s test preferentially detects more deadly cancers, which could help doctors and patients avoid finding less dangerous and potentially over-diagnosed cancers, Grail’s chief scientific officer Alex Aravanis said by telephone.

“Based on these really encouraging data we plan to start returning results to patients next year,” a key step toward commercialization, Aravanis said. Returning results would mean a separate study where doctors and patients were informed about a cancer in real-time, where that cancer likely is located and then finding a path to care for newly diagnosed patients.

While there are already liquid biopsy tests on the market, like Roche Holding AG’s FoundationOne or Guardant Health Inc’s Guardant360, these tests profile specific mutations in already diagnosed cancers. Moving into early cancer detection has been a pipe dream for many companies for years.

Results that Grail says support its methylation approach -- which looks at changes in gene expression to find cancers -- will be presented in a poster at ASCO in Chicago on Saturday.

On Thursday another company targeting the liquid biopsy market announced its launch. Thrive Earlier Detection Corp. received $100 million in financing led by Third Rock Ventures. Other backers included Exact Sciences, which has been doing its own work in to liquid biopsy. Thrive’s CancerSEEK test has shown a 99% specificity rate in a smaller number of patients, according to data published in Science last year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cristin Flanagan in New York at cflanagan1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Scott Schnipper, Will Daley

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