Caris Life Sci­ences has pulled in an­oth­er mas­sive raise, and this time they’re re­port­ed­ly one step clos­er to launch­ing their IPO.

The AI-fo­cused Caris pulled in an $830 mil­lion growth eq­ui­ty round, the com­pa­ny an­nounced Tues­day af­ter­noon, earn­ing a val­u­a­tion of about $7.83 bil­lion. Tues­day’s raise al­so brings their to­tal fi­nanc­ing amount to $1.3 bil­lion since 2018 and $1.14 bil­lion since last Oc­to­ber. Ac­cord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal, which first re­port­ed on the raise, Caris ex­pects to com­plete their IPO some­time with­in the next 12 months.

Caris’ strat­e­gy uti­lizes ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence to map a can­cer pa­tient’s ge­net­ic make­up and de­ter­mine which kinds of treat­ments would be best suit­ed for an op­ti­mal out­come. The com­pa­ny says their plat­form al­lows doc­tors to as­sess all 22,000 genes in both DNA and RNA to do so, uti­liz­ing whole ex­ome se­quenc­ing, whole tran­scrip­tome se­quenc­ing and pro­tein analy­sis in ad­di­tion to its AI mod­els.

Funds from Tues­day’s raise will al­low Caris to push their ef­forts in­to liq­uid biop­sies, in ad­di­tion to the sol­id tu­mor biop­sy ser­vices they cur­rent­ly pro­vide. One of these new pro­grams comes in the form of a blood-based pan-can­cer test, which Caris hopes can be used to de­tect can­cers in their ear­li­er stages.

“This re­cent raise will help us bring our mar­ket-lead­ing sci­ence and tech­nolo­gies to as many pa­tients as pos­si­ble, ul­ti­mate­ly rein­vent­ing can­cer care,” CEO David Hal­bert said in a state­ment. “We plan to un­lock the full po­ten­tial of pre­ci­sion med­i­cine through com­pre­hen­sive in­ter­ro­ga­tion of can­cer at the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el.”

Pre­ci­sion med­i­cine — and all the tools that make it pos­si­ble — is a high-fly­ing area of the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try, ev­i­denced by Caris’ own fi­nanc­ing and uni­corn val­u­a­tion. One of its main com­peti­tors in ge­nom­ic pro­fil­ing is Foun­da­tion Med­i­cine, which was ac­quired by Roche for $2.4 bil­lion back in 2018. The buy­out had fol­lowed a sim­i­lar $1.9 bil­lion deal where Roche pur­chased Flat­iron Health and their health records sys­tem.

Mean­while, Caris’ move in­to the liq­uid biop­sy are­na will see it join a rel­a­tive­ly new but crowd­ed field, pit­ting it against well-known play­ers like Guardant Health and Third Rock-backed Thrive Ear­li­er De­tec­tion. There’s al­so the Il­lu­mi­na spin-out Grail, which notched its own hefty raise in May 2020 with $390 mil­lion in new fi­nanc­ing and sub­se­quent­ly planned an IPO.

Be­fore it could go pub­lic, how­ev­er, Il­lu­mi­na an­nounced it would be re-ac­quir­ing Grail last Sep­tem­ber for $8 bil­lion. That merg­er was put on hold ear­li­er this year af­ter the FTC moved to block the deal from go­ing through.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

The government of the United Kingdom is giving out grants to several manufacturers that have a presence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The government announced that four companies, including Ipsen, contract manufacturer Pharmaron, DNA manufacturer Touchlight and diagnostic test producer Randox, will receive a total of £277 million ($341.1 million). According to a release from the UK government, this represents the first portion of grants from the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund.