Guardant Health, a Redwood City, Calif.-based developer of comprehensive liquid biopsies, secured $360m in new funding.
The round, which brought total funding to more than $500m, was led by a SoftBank Group subsidiary with participation from certain funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price, Associates, Inc., Temasek, and others including existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, OrbiMed, and 8VC.
Guardant Health and SoftBank also announced the formation of a new joint venture to expand commercialization of Guardant Health’s liquid biopsy technology in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, regions where more than 7.8 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year.
The financing will support work to expand Project LUNAR, Guardant Health’s early cancer detection efforts announced in 2016. The initial LUNAR products will look for evidence of residual disease in patients who have undergone surgery, radiation, or other treatments intended to cure them of cancer. Then, Guardant Health expects to introduce tests to identify early signs of cancer in high-risk patients who have not yet been diagnosed.
Led by Helmy Eltoukhy, Co-Founder and CEO, and AmirAli Talasaz, Co-Founder and President, Guardant Health develops products for early cancer detection. The company first created Guardant360, a test which includes 73 genes associated with cancer, and detects single nucleotide variants, insertion and deletion events, copy number amplifications, and fusions.
Introduced in 2014, the liquid biopsy has since been ordered by more than 3,000 oncologists for more than 35,000 patient samples.
FinSMEs
11/05/2017