Guardant Health, a three-year-old, Redwood Shores, Ca.-based company whose non-invasive genomic sequencing test for cancer requires just two vials of blood, has raised nearly $100 million in Series D funding roughly one year after closing on $90 million for its Series C round.
The financing was led by OrbiMed Advisors, with earlier backers participating, including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pejman Mar, Formation 8, Heritage Group, and Felicis Ventures.
Guardant, a 135-person company that has now raised almost $200 million altogether, isn’t talking about its valuation. But cofounder and CEO Helmy Eltoukhy, a Ph.D who worked at the Stanford Genome Technology Center before cofounding and quickly selling an earlier company, talked with us yesterday about what Guardant’s investors are funding exactly. Our conversation has been edited for length.
Your test alleviates the need to cut out a piece of tissue and sequence the DNA in that biopsy. Other than being less invasive, why is it better?
You can take a single tumor and every part will have potentially different mutations. Through two teaspoons of blood, we can see the entirety of the disease.
How has your technology changed in the last year? What prompted so much new investment?
The way it works is as these tumors grow rapidly, they are also dying rapidly and shedding their content into the bloodstream, including DNA signature. [Over time] we’ve made our sequencing technology about 1,000 to 10,000 times more accurate in order to see those fragments of DNA. It’s akin to the difference between high-resolution TV and old black-and-white technologies. Because we can see those trace fragments, we can reconstruct the genome.
How accurate is your blood test?
It matches tissue biopsies with 99.3 percent diagnostic accuracy, and we see often more mutations [than doctors can find] in that tissue biopsy. Maybe the patient had a recent biopsy and nothing actionable was found, but now, with the mutations that we detect, that person can be given corresponding drugs that target those mutations.
Have the public woes of another blood-testing company, Theranos, impacted your business?