On Tuesday, shares of Grail, the liquid biopsy company that hopes that its test, Galleri, will be widely used to screen for cancer, will become a publicly traded stock (with the ticker GRAL) that any investor can buy or sell on the Nasdaq.
That will, in a sense, end a long, strange trip that has taken a decade. Grail was spun out by the DNA sequencing giant Illumina in 2015. In 2020, Illumina announced plans to purchase the company for $8 billion. But that deal, though eventually closed, was scuttled by regulatory issues in both the U.S. and Europe, and European regulators forced Illumina to spin Grail back out.
Grail now says it expects to file for full approval in the U.S. in 2026. In the meantime, the company is running an annual loss of about $500 million a year. As part of the agreement to spin it out, Illumina has capitalized it with about 2 1/2 years worth of funding.
