GRAIL Plans to Raise in Excess of $1B in Series B Funding

This is HUGE news and really interesting.

To recap, GRAIL was created largely by Illumina to help drive sales of their sequencing instruments. Illumina lead (>80% market share) the DNA sequencing market.

However the market is still mostly pretty much research applications, and DNA sequencing has found limited applications in diagnostic settings.

This is their play to start selling into the clinic. Nobody else has really been able to break that market.

1BUSD might finally be enough to make that happen and if it does, that's really exciting. GRAIL are going for screening because that's the largest, most viable market (every adult, every N years).

The problem, is that to be viable it likely has to be cheap. Illumina currently charge about 1000USD per human genome sequenced. Screening costs would probably be similar. Illumina do charge around a 10x markup, so they've got scope to give GRAIL a special deal. But the screening test probably does need to be around 100USD.

If the play works out, Illumina will end up owning clinical diagnostic applications of DNA sequencing. It will kill any other players trying to move into this area.

Really interesting, 1BUSD is a huge bet.