Hackers steal patient info from Guardant Health

Photo by Taskin Ashiq on Unsplash

Liquid biopsy company Guardant Health has revealed that 1,100 patients’ information was stolen in a phishing attack in July.

The Redwood City, Calif. company said in an SEC filing that an unauthorized user hacked an employee’s email account and accessed patients’ names, contact information, birth dates, medical diagnosis codes, and, in a very limited number of cases, Social Security numbers, over a five-day period.

“We continue to analyze the information that was accessed and intend to take additional steps to prevent future unauthorized access to our systems and the data we maintain, but we cannot guarantee that additional incidents will be avoided,” the company said in the SEC filing.

Guardant is seeking to raise $100 million in an initial public offering after having raised more than $500 million from other investors. Previous funding includes $360 million raised last year from SoftBank Group,  T. Rowe Price, Temasek and others including existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, OrbiMed, and 8VC.

The company aims to sequence 1 million cancer patients faster than any previous initiative or clinical trial. Its first product, the Guardant360 assay, came to market in 2014. In 2016, it announced Project LUNAR, an effort to apply Guardant Health’s technology platform to early detection, recurrence monitoring, and assessing minimal residual disease.

Also in July, Guardant and Foundation Medicine announced that they had settled a patent infringement lawsuit that Foundation had brought against Guardant. The settlement terms were not disclosed.

 

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