RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – The innovative California-based cancer-detection company GRAIL, Inc., which is establishing a $100 million-plus facility in Research Triangle Park, is preparing to go public.
GRAIL said it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock in the United States.
GRAIL
The company said it hasn’t yet determined how many shares would be offered or the price range for the proposed offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol GRAL.
In June the company announced plans to invest $103 million and create nearly 400 new jobs over the next four years in RTP.
The 5-year-old Menlo Park company, whose mission is “to detect cancer early, when it can be cured,” has raised more than $2 billion in venture capital to support its development of a “liquid biopsy” blood test to detect more than 50 types of cancers in people, even before they develop symptoms.
The platform technology combines genetic sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and big data.
Biotech firm GRAIL to invest $103M for Durham facility, adding hundreds of jobs
According to Joshua Ofman, M.D., MSHS, chief medical officer responsible for external affairs, GRAIL is employing a single blood test designed to maximize population cancer detection while minimizing potential harms. As a complement to existing screening tests, he said GRAIL’s test can detect more than 50 cancers across all stages, with a very low false positive rate of less than 1.0%.
“When a cancer signal is detected,” he said, “our test can identify where in the body the cancer is located with high accuracy — critical to enable health care providers to direct efficient work-up and subsequent care for patients. Recent modeling data suggests if all cancers currently diagnosed at stage IV could be detected earlier, evenly distributed across stages I-III, cancer deaths could fall by 24 percent.”
(C) N.C. Biotech Center
Biotech firm GRAIL to invest $103M for Durham facility, adding hundreds of jobs
