Keep pulling the thread on Helmy Eltoukhy.
Guardant Health's proprietary technology improves the accuracy of DNA sequencing by 1,000 to 10,000-fold compared to off-the-shelf sequencers.
Guardant Health's long-term vision is to create a cancer screening test that can be administered as part of a routine annual physical.
The Guardant360 test has a list price of approximately $5,000, compared to a total cost of $15,000 to $20,000 for a traditional tissue biopsy and subsequent genomic profiling.
In clinical studies, Guardant Health's liquid biopsy test detects 85% of the genomic alterations found in a tissue biopsy, while a tissue biopsy only detects 80% of what the liquid biopsy finds.
The diagnostic accuracy of Guardant Health's liquid biopsy is 99.3% concordant with tissue biopsies for the mutations it detects.
Guardant Health believes it genomically sequences more cancer patients than Memorial Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson Cancer Center combined.
The fastest-growing part of Guardant Health's business is its work with pharmaceutical companies to screen patients for clinical trials.
The average cost of a traditional tissue biopsy for lung cancer is $14,000.
Traditional tissue biopsies for lung cancer have a 19% complication rate.
Guardant Health launched its liquid biopsy product, Guardant360, in June 2014.
Guardant Health's Guardant360 test is intended for the approximately one million late-stage cancer patients in the U.S.
Guardant Health is processing more than 20,000 patient samples per year.