Francis Desouza on multi-cancer early detection
From Illumina CEO joins Fast Money from the JPM Health Care Conference · · CNBC Television
“Grail launched Galleri which is the world's first multi-cancer early detection blood test so it's a blood test and it's on the market now that you can do that'll tell you that can help detect one of 50 different types of cancer now 45 of those cancers like pancreatic cancer for example some really deadly cancers have no other screen and and Grail has a less than one percent false positive rate and so we announced today that you know Grail is off to a really strong start that they are signing up employers they signed up 11 employers including U-Haul I know we at Illumina have rolled the test out internally to our employees they signed up a number of health care providers so last year 1500 there were 1500 prescribing providers of the Grail test you know to people to use it as a screen in addition they signed up some health care system so they announced the Knight Cancer Center uh today that's part of the OHSU up in Oregon and and and the Knight Cancer Center joins other partners like the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic uh that are embracing the Grail test and so real strong traction of that test in the market now we know catching cancer already can make a big difference in survival rates and so there's a lot of excitement about how a test like Grail could help save lives going forward and the fact that it's got good early traction exceeding expectations that investors had i think was very well received.”
On , Francis Desouza, Former President & Chief Executive Officer at Illumina, Inc., spoke about multi-cancer early detection during Illumina CEO joins Fast Money from the JPM Health Care Conference on CNBC Television.
About Francis Desouza
Francis deSouza, then CEO of Illumina, appeared on CNBC in December 2021 and January 2022 to discuss the company's role in COVID-19 genomic surveillance and its financial performance. In December 2021, deSouza stated that the U.S. had made progress in sequencing COVID-19 positives, reaching a national rate of five to ten percent in the prior three months, though he noted variability across states, with some sequencing 30 percent of positives and others only one percent. He described the Omicron variant as "surprisingly" heavily mutated, with over 50 new mutations, and said hypotheses for its emergence included chronic infection in an immunocompromised person, animal-to-human transmission, or circulation in an unsequenced population. He also said the U.K. had been a leader in genomic surveillance since April 2020, while most other countries did not follow until December 2020. In January 2022, deSouza said Illumina's 2021 revenue grew 39 percent over the previous year and that the company guided for 14 to 16 percent growth in 2022, which he described as "significantly ahead" of expectations. He attributed the growth to expanding reimbursement for genomic testing, noting that over one billion people worldwide had reimbursement for some form of genomic testing, with expectations to reach two billion in a few years. He also said that over 117 countries were using Illumina for COVID genomic surveillance, and that the company's Grail cancer detection test was signing up employers and healthcare providers.