Biotech startup bringing 400 jobs to Durham after landing incentive package
GRAIL, a venture-backed biotech startup that makes blood tests for cancer, will bring 390 jobs to Durham over the next five years after landing an incentive package from North Carolina.
The company has promised to create the jobs by 2025 and invest $103 million into facilities in exchange for the incentive package, which is valued at $5.7 million. Durham County is also pledging $678,000 in incentives.
The state’s Commerce Department said GRAIL intends to build a 200,000-square-foot facility in Durham, where it will process its blood samples. The company is expected to start hiring in 2021.
The incentives were approved Tuesday morning by the state’s Economic Investment Committee, which met through a video conference.
The job announcement comes as the coronavirus pandemic has caused more than a million North Carolinians to file for unemployment, as many businesses were forced to shut down or saw their business decline significantly in the past three months.
The state has still managed to lure several corporate expansions despite the downturn through the use of incentives.
Last week, Commerce announced the addition of more than 400 manufacturing jobs in Rockingham County with a Job Development Investment Grant worth more than $3 million over a 12-year period.
In April, the state awarded a JDIG of more than $30 million to the tech company Bandwidth to hire more than 1,000 employees in Raleigh over the next eight years.
“Even in tough economic times, companies like GRAIL see that North Carolina is ready to support the life sciences sector with a strong workforce,” Gov. Roy Cooper said in a statement. “North Carolina had a solid foundation for job growth before the virus, and that will make the road to recovery faster in the coming months.”
Founded in 2015 in Menlo Park, California, GRAIL has raised around $2 billion from investors, according to Crunchbase, including a $390 million injection of capital last month. GRAIL says its blood test can detect more than 50 cancers with a single blood draw.
That funding round came after GRAIL published data in the Annals of Oncology showing its blood test was able to spot more than 50 types of disease, according to Fierce Biotech, a news outlet that covers the biotech industry.
The data, which came from a study that had more than 15,000 participants, showed that its test could specify where cancer was growing in a body with 93% accuracy and had an overall false-positive rate of less than 1% using a single drawn blood sample, Firece Biotech reported.
In 2019, the company received a breakthrough device designation for its blood test from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The Durham jobs, which the state said will be production, administration and commercialization roles, will have an average salary of at least $71,705, according to the Commerce Department.
GRAIL was considering Durham and Houston as finalists for the jobs, the state’s Commerce Department said.
Uplaksh Kumar, a senior vice president for strategic operations at GRAIL, said the Triangle’s large pool of skilled talent was one of the reasons it chose Durham.
“[I]ts large pool of skilled talent and innovative spirit that is critical to the success of our mission to detect cancer early and save lives,” Kumar said in a statement. “This expansion is an important step forward in making our pioneering, multi-cancer early detection blood test widely available to patients and healthcare providers across the country.”
To receive the incentive, GRAIL will be required to provide audited financial reports annually to the state, a move Commerce usually takes when it gives incentives to non-public companies.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 1:50 PM with the headline "Biotech startup bringing 400 jobs to Durham after landing incentive package."
