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Guardant Health<\/a>, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based biotech company that sells blood tests to track and potentially detect cancer, has raised a whopping $360 million from investors, bringing its total funding to $550 million.\u00a0SoftBank led the round, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, OrbiMed, 8VC, numerous funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price, and Temasek, among others.<\/p>\n The company has huge ambitions to allow doctors to see the entirety of a cancer with just two teaspoons of blood\u00a0\u2014 versus seeing part of a the disease by taking a biopsy of it.<\/p>\n As CEO Helmy Eltoukhy explained<\/a> to us last year, \u201cThe\u00a0way it works is\u00a0as these tumors grow rapidly, they are also dying rapidly and shedding\u00a0their content into the bloodstream, including their DNA signature. [Over time] we\u2019ve made our sequencing technology about 1,000 to 10,000 times more accurate in order to see those fragments of DNA. It\u2019s akin to the\u00a0difference between high-resolution TV and old black-and-white technologies.\u00a0Because we can see those trace fragments, we can reconstruct the genome.\u201d<\/p>\n Guardant says it matches tissue biopsies with 99.3 percent diagnostic accuracy, and that it often discovers more mutations than doctors could find otherwise.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s goal is to\u00a0help\u00a0one\u00a0million people over the next five years with its test.<\/p>\n It\u2019ll face some stiff competition along the way. In March, Grail, a blood-test startup spun out of DNA sequencing giant Illumina last year, announced a $900 million<\/a> round\u00a0that includes Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson. It\u2019s also racing toward clinical trials with its cancer-screening technology.<\/p>\n In March,\u00a0Freenome<\/a>, another liquid biopsy diagnosis platform that detects the cell-free DNA sequencing of cancer, also\u00a0raised a huge round. The\u00a0$65 million Series A financing<\/a> was led by Andreessen Horowitz, which also<\/a> led the company\u2019s $5.5 million seed round less than a year ago.<\/p>\n Featured Image: Ian Cuming\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/09\/gettyimages-475158101.jpg?w=680\")
Guardant Health, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based biotech company that sells blood tests to track and potentially detect cancer, has raised a whopping $360 million from investors, bringing its total funding to $550 million.\u00a0SoftBank led the round, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, OrbiMed, 8VC, numerous funds and accounts managed by T. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/img><\/a>
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