By Admin at 23 Mar 2016, 14:31 PM
It’s called GRAIL, an aptly named startup company launched by biotech company Illumina (the same company that has made DNA sequencing affordable and efficient). Its goal is laudable and, if it succeeds, would represent one of the Holy Grails that cancer doctors and researchers have been looking for – a blood test that could detect all cancers.
Such a test would revolutionize the war on cancer, as its aim is to detect cancer in the body early enough that it could be easily treated. GRAIL already has $100 million in funding and is backed by several bigwigs including Bill Gates, ARCH Ventures, Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Illumina executive Richard Klausner explained at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in December 2014:
“There’s a phenomena that we now know that tumors put out, at very early stages, their DNA into the circulation … We can now measure that with incredible precision. I think one of the biggest breakthroughs we can see in cancer in the next few years is this possibility that there could be a blood test or a urine test that detects early-stage cancer.”
If researchers can find the rogue tumor DNA put out into a person’s bloodstream early on, they could potentially determine if that person has cancer at a highly curable stage, presumably without any false positives. To create such a test, researchers will need to sequence the genes of tens of thousands of patients not just once but hundreds or thousands of times each to look for potentially cancerous changes.
There are many questions to be answered, such as whether the test will detect small cancers that would be wiped out by a person’s immune system. In that case, unnecessary treatment could result. Critics also wonder if such a test is even possible, although Jay Flatley, Illumina’s chief executive, believes the test will be created within a year.
At first, the test may only be able to detect people in the late stages of the disease, or it may need to be combined with another form of cancer screening, such as mammography, which has a high false positive rate. However, Flatley told Forbes he plans to move fast and expects to start the massive GRAIL clinical trial next year. Forbes reported:
“That the effort is nascent isn’t stopping Flatley and [Robert] Nelsen [an ARCH partner and co-founder of Illumina] from dreaming big. They both imagine that maybe someday the test would not only identify cancer, but provide the key to killing it.
Maybe the DNA mutations identified by such a test could be inserted in the killer white blood cells being engineered by Nelsen’s other company, Juno, and injected into the patient. Then they would hardly ever know they had cancer.”
Source
Forbes January 10, 2016
58
Current Gateway-funded clinical trials
150+
Clinical trials funded at leading institutions worldwide
$16.56
Funds one patient for one day at a Gateway-funded clinical trial
