To Catch Early Cancer, and Rivals, Thrive Banks on Hopkins Blood Test

▤ Summary

Thrive Earlier Detection has raised $110 million in financing from biotech investors Third Rock Ventures and others to develop a low-cost test—with a price tag in the hundreds, not thousands of dollars—that primary care doctors can use to screen healthy patients for the first signs of a variety of cancers. A main competitor, Grail, launched three years ago with the same aim and has since raised more than $1 billion from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, a host of big drug companies, and Chinese investors, much of that going into large-scale clinical trials. But Guardant, riding last year’s blockbuster IPO wave, has made no secret of its ambition to eventually provide cancer screening for healthy people with its Lunar product, which is still in the research-only phase. Thrive plans to add other layers of analysis to CancerSEEK, what Kafka called an “integrated service,” such as a review group to interpret positive results. When asked how Thrive’s proposed service–which would seem to require human expertise and analysis, akin to the tumor boards that hospitals convene to mull over difficult cases—could meet the goal of costing no more than a few hundred dollars per test, Kafka said that the clinical review could eventually be “virtual.” Photo of Gilman Hall, Johns Hopkins University by Callison-Burch via Creative Commons.

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