Illumina Inc. is developing a universal blood test to identify early-stage cancers in people with no symptoms of the disease.

The San Diego maker of gene-sequencing machines said that it is forming the company called Grail with a group of other investors, marking the latest bet that so-called liquid biopsies will become a major tool for detecting, diagnosing and managing treatment of cancer.

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Illumina is backed by more than $100 million in its initial financing. Arch Venture Partners is also a lead investor, with additional participation from Amazon.com Inc. CEO Bezos, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Jay Flatley, Illumina’s chief executive and chairman of Grail, stated that the test will be designed to screen people who have no cancer symptoms and detect disease at its earliest stages when the chance to cure it is highest, according to Wall Street Journal. 

The testing concept being pursued by Illumina, sometimes called a liquid biopsy, is to use high-speed DNA sequencing machines to scour a person’s blood for fragments of DNA released by cancer cells. If DNA with cancer-causing mutations is present, it often indicates a tumor is already forming, even if it’s too small to cause symptoms or be seen on an imaging machine.

The challenges to creating such a test are daunting because the technology is new and companies will have to prove that they can catch and track cancer cells as accurately as traditional methods if they hope to upend standard procedures. A false positive could cause undue patient anxiety, while a false negative could lead a patient’s cancer to go untreated.

However, scientists have become more hopeful they can create a blood test because genetic sequencing has become more affordable and the technology has improved enough to detect just a few molecules of errant DNA in a vial of blood. Grail’s approach uses Illumina’s technology to detect bits of genetic material from cancers in the blood, a bet that there is enough detectable material to accurately find the presence of cancer.

With Illumina’s technology, it is possible to perform the especially detailed analyses of DNA fragments needed to develop and validate the test and to market it at an affordable price. Grail will have to sequence between 100,000 to 300,000 human genomes at exceptionally deep levels to develop a reliable test, Reuters reported. 

Grail will spend 2016 refining the test before testing it in clinical trials beginning in 2017. Gene sequencing company aims to have its test on the market by 2019.