Monday, September 21, 2020

Illumina Acquires GRAIL For $8 Billion

San Diego-based life sciences equipment maker Illumina announced this morning that it has acquired Menlo Park-based GRAIL, a developer of cancer early detection technology. According to Illumina, it will acquire GRAIL for cash and stock worth $8 billion. The deal also includes unspecified future earnout based on future revenues related to GRAIL. Illumina said the buy will help it add a multi-disciplinary team and capabilities for next generation sequencing (NGS), population scale clinical studies, and machine learning. GRAIL is developing a multi-cancer screening test. GRAIL was spun out of Illumina in 2016 as a standalone company. Illumina and GRAIL said the acquisition is split between $3.5 billion in cash and $4.5 billion in shares of Illumina common stock.