Jeff Bezos-Backed Cancer Detection Startup Grail Files For IPO

Healthcare startup Grail Inc filed an S-1 statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday for listing its stock on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

The security will be listed under the symbol “GRAL.” Grail was established five years ago and has been developing a pan-cancer screening test with the help of Illumina Inc’s ILMN sequencing technology.

What Happened: It isn't immediately clear how much Grail plans to raise in the offering, or the number of shares it intends to sell. In the filing, the cancer research company put $100 million as the placeholder amount.

The leading book-runners for the public issue include Morgan Stanley MS, Goldman Sachs & Co LLC, and Bank of America Corp. BAC with Cowen and Evercore Inc. EVR as the additional book-runners.

Why It Matters: Grail started off as a unit of Illumina and raised around $2 billion from prominent investors like Amazon Inc AMZN CEO Jeff Bezos and the pharmaceutical titan Johnson & Johnson JNJ, according to Stat.

Some of the company’s institutional investors also include pension boards like Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Public Sector Pension Investment Board.

Grail has enrolled over 115,000 participants for its Galleri trial, a blood test that aims to different types of detect cancer. Galleri is expected to launch as a laboratory-developed test sometime in 2021.

The company is also engaged in various other studies like evaluating the efficacy of a blood test to detect multiple types of cancer, characterizing the landscape of genomic cancer signals, as well as validating blood tests that can detect early signs of cancer.