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The NHS is experimenting with a simple blood test that can help identify more than 50 forms of cancer years before diagnosis, in what has been hailed as a potential “game changer.”
If successful, the blood test, known as Galleri, could revolutionize early cancer detection and save many lives by identifying symptoms quickly enough to allow for timely treatment to make the difference between life and death.
The blood test will be offered to 165,000 people in England from mid-2021, the vast majority of whom have no signs of the disease.
NHS England hopes that the test will prove particularly useful for detecting early signs of cancers that are difficult to detect and therefore have worse survival rates, such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer.
Sir Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England, said: “Early detection, particularly for difficult-to-treat conditions such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer, has the potential to save many lives. This promising blood test could therefore be a game changer in cancer treatment, helping thousands of people get successful treatment. “
If the study finds that the blood test can detect cancers early, it will be available routinely at the end of this decade.
The 165,000 people who will be offered the test will be between the ages of 50 and 79. Of these 140,000 will be symptom-free. They will be identified through NHS folders, randomly selected and invited to participate in the trial. Those participating in the study will take a blood test every year for three years to check for malignant growths.
The other 25,000 people will be those identified by their GP as having possible signs of cancer, such as a lump or discharge. They will need to provide a blood sample, as well as do conventional tests such as a CT scan or MRI, to speed up the diagnosis.
NHS England believes Galleri’s tests could lead to cancer diagnoses in people with cancer several years before it would otherwise. The tests could also pinpoint where in the body the cancer was developing, they said.
If the results in 2023 show that the test works, the NHS will recruit a million more people for a much larger process in 2024 and 2025.
The Galleri blood test, which checks for molecular changes, was developed by Grail, a California-based company that is using science and technology to find ways to identify cancer in its early stages.
Lord Prior, president of NHS England, said he hopes the Grail link will help reduce the number of people, nearly 200,000 in the UK, who die from cancer each year. “Many of these people are diagnosed too late for the treatment to be effective,” he said.
The tests could help the NHS fulfill its promise of increasing the percentage of cancer patients whose disease is diagnosed early, in the first stage, from 50% to 75%. People whose cancer is detected at that stage are five to ten times more likely to survive than those identified in stage four alone.
Lawrence Young, a professor of molecular oncology at Warwick University, said the Galleri test was one of several new blood tests developed to detect cancer early. “A publication from the Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas consortium examining the Galleri test on 6,689 participants has generated very encouraging results in more than 50 different types of cancer at different stages of development.”
However, some cancer experts disagreed about Galleri’s possible effectiveness. Paul Pharoah, a professor of cancer epidemiology at Cambridge University, said the NHS was prematurely adopting a test that had yet to be proven to work.
“Galleri’s blood test is a test that may be able to detect cancer in the blood in individuals with early stage cancer, although the evidence that it does so effectively is weak,” Pharoah said. He said the only published paper available on the tests found they detected only 25 percent of early-stage cancers and less than half of late-stage cases of the disease.
Cancer charities have welcomed the trial. Annwen Jones, CEO of Target Ovarian Cancer, said, “Two-thirds of women with ovarian cancer are currently diagnosed late, when cancer is much more difficult to treat. This test, if proven to be effective, could be a major game changer in ovarian cancer diagnosis in this country, saving thousands of lives every year. “
Sir Harpal Kumar, chairman of the Grail in Europe, and former CEO of Cancer Research UK, said: “Galleri, a simple blood test that can detect more than 50 cancers, is a revolutionary and potentially life-saving advance that could have a enormous human and economic advantage. “
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