with dark statistics Leading cause of death in the world: 1 in 2 of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime. Early diagnosis greatly improves survival, but unfortunately 80 to 90 percent of cancer deaths are due to unscreened cancers, said Harpal Kumar, president of Grail’s European division. said. Grail is on a mission to detect cancer early.
Of the more than 200 types of cancer, Kumar says it is currently only screening for cervical, breast and bowel cancers. He calls it the streetlight problem. But even with all these cancers, people wouldn’t come to his 200 tests. “The paradigm of him looking for these cancers one by one cannot continue,” he says.
The dream is a single test that can identify all cancers with one blood draw. This is pretty much what Grail has been developing. It is sensitive to early-stage cancers, can detect and identify many types of cancer, and is rarely misdiagnosed. It is positive and allows us to focus on the most serious cancers.
The result is a gallery. The company says he can detect more than 50 types of cancer in a single blood sample. Just like normal cells release DNA when they die, tumor cells also release her DNA, and this DNA is traceable in the blood. The test has been validated by Grail in clinical trials. If the test detects anything, there is a 45% chance it is cancer, which is a very high predictive rate for a cancer test. Galleri says he can predict where cancer is in the body with 90 percent accuracy.
This test has been commercially available in the US for 18 months. The next step is the NHS-Galleri clinical trial. To demonstrate that this test works at scale. It will take several years, and the next one will be completed in three years,” says Kumar.
