Jeff Huber, who helped lead the development of Google’s ad software and its iconic maps application will be the chief executive of Grail, a startup that raised $100 million last month to create a blood test to detect cancer early, when it is treatable.
His reasons are scientific, but also personal. On November 10, Huber’s wife Laura, died of colon cancer. She left behind two children, ages 12 and 14. “That’s a big part of why I’m taking this up,” Huber says.
Before Laura became sick, Huber was already turning his focus toward biology. He missed the energy of his early days at
He joined the board of directors at
Then cancer crept up on Laura. She was 46, super-healthy, super-fit and full of energy. She had no family history of cancer. She felt her energy ebb, he says, and at first the doctor just told her she was going through menopause. But the diagnosis didn’t seem to fit, and they decided on more tests. And endoscopy and colonoscopy were expected to turn up irritable bowel syndrome, or perhaps, at worst, Crohn’s disease, the inflammatory bowel disorder.
Instead, they found a two-centimeter colorectal cancer tumor. Still, the news seemed good. The tumor was small, and the chances that surgery would cure her seemed high. But before performing surgery, doctors did a standard test: they gave her a bit of radioactive glucose. Cancer loves glucose, the body’s main form of sugar, and as a result the radioactive form makes tumors light up on a PET scan. Laura had cancer in her liver, throughout her abdomen, through her chest, and all the way up to her neck.
They attacked the cancer with every drug they could, all sorts of chemotherapy and, toward the end, new drugs that boost the immune system. “By the time she was diagnosed, by the time she was in treatment, the cancer had spread extensively, was attacking other systems in the body, had evolved further and it was just too aggressive,” Huber says. Laura died three months ago today.
As his family had its personal battle with cancer, Huber had been watching a new idea for fighting the disease take root from his board seat at Illumina. The company had been looking for new uses for its DNA sequencing machines, and its scientists thought that they had found clues that they could detect cancer early with a blood test.
The idea is that cancer cells shed DNA (and also RNA, a related genetic messenger) into the bloodstream. What Illumina’s scientists seemed to be finding was that if you sequenced DNA again and again, not just 30 times as researchers do to get an accurate copy of a single human genome, but hundreds of thousands of times, they thought they could detect these bits of cancer DNA and RNA. Actually making such a blood test would mean finding combinations of many genetic mutations, and require much more research. But the idea was potentially world-changing: a blood test that could detect many types of cancer, early.
Last month, Illumina announced that it was creating a new company, GRAIL, to create this blood test. It is backed with $100 million in funding from Illumina, Sutter Hill Ventures, ARCH Ventures, Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions and Bill Gates. Today, the company is announcing that Huber will serve as its chief executive. And he’s clear that one reason he’s taking the job is because of what he saw his wife suffer through.
“She’s one story among millions of stories,” Huber says. “But it is a potentially interesting case study. If GRAIL had existed previously, if it had been available three years ago or four years ago or five years ago when she got her annual physical exam and did a blood test anyway, and if the results had come back then saying that you have early stage cancer, there’s a very good chance that the outcome for her could have been different. She could have had surgery before it spread, or she could have gotten treatment before it evolved and mutated before it became more aggressive.”
There are big scientific challenges to this story. Maybe cancers like Laura’s start out aggressive, and will metastasize and kill no matter how early you catch them. And what if the still-uncreated cancer blood test sometimes tells people they have cancer when they don’t? What are patients supposed to do with a blood test result that tells them they have cancer, but not where in the body it is or what stage it is or how to treat it? Someday, Huber and other Illumina executives say, they expect the test will tell patients how to treat the cancer, too, but right now the test doesn’t even exist!
The company has to talk to the Food and Drug Administration, and convince researchers that GRAIL’s plan to conduct a giant study to develop and validate the test is the correct way forward. Right now, it has presented no data that its world-changing idea would work. It comes down to a big “trust us” based on the caliber of GRAIL’s backers and, now, its chief executive.
“There’s lots of hard work we have to do at GRAIL,” Huber concedes. “But if we can get it right, it’s clear to me that’s the most obvious path for being able to save millions of lives, and to spare both the patients themselves, but also friends and family from the experience that Laura had to go through.”
The next step is simple. It's Jeff Huber’s first day of work.
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