SoftBank and many other companies invest billions of money into cancer testing technology with blood

Cancer and related dangerous agents will soon be reduced to high risk if this method is completed in the near future.

Guardant Health, a company that aims to optimize the diagnosis process, just tests for cancer like a blood test has spent $ 360 million on this investment. The project is led by SoftBank Group and also has other investors who have contributed to Guardant, such as Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Overall, Guardant has a capital of more than $ 500 million.

Specifically, Guardant will conduct a "liquid biopsy" with Guardant360's name, use blood samples from cancer patients and sequence genetic data in that blood sample to find out what is The most effective way to treat a tumor. These tests require the process of circulating the DNA of the tumor, or a piece of DNA found from the cancer cells that get into the blood.

Guardant Health aims to optimize the diagnosis process, testing for cancer is as simple as a blood test.

This new method will help Guardant move toward completing the goal of separating and diagnosing 1 million cancer patients in just five years, which has a great effect on developing an early trial plan to deal with. negative agents. Normally, to complete a test at the present time, it takes a lot of complicated and difficult information and components to prepare.

"Certainly the work to do to find every corner related to a cancer will involve a lot of complicated data," Guardant CEO Helmy Eltoukhy shared by Business Insider.

Bright perspective on early diagnosis of cancer

Guardant is not really the only name that goes on this arduous path. This is actually a war that has taken place and developed in the last few years, with great interest and investment. Last March, Grail announced that it was raising investment capital of up to $ 900 million from pharmaceutical manufacturers and Amazon to make improvements to its large-scale project. Freenome, another company that is also aiming to build a new blood test method, can find the earliest signs of cancer, and contribute $ 65 million on the same day.

Blood tests for early diagnosis of cancer are of great interest and investment.

Of course, there are still many doubts about the effectiveness of investment efforts in this new method. According to Medscape's investigation on 132 oncologists, 36% chose to doubt the feasibility and effect of this genetic exploitation method. 61% of them also said that less than 25% of patients will be able to benefit from that study, the rest will not.

However, a little optimistic is that 89% of the respondents seem quite positive when referring to the prospect 10 years after they think that this method will improve and prove their use.