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Researchers around the world seek treatments to overcome this disease, which continues to kill millions every year.
The British National Health Service (NHS) announces that it will carry out a pilot program for a test that can quickly detect more than 50 different types of cancer, a test that could help thousands of people and help better treat cancer in its first stages.
The “Galleri” blood test was developed by a California company, Grail, and will be used for the first time for 165,000 patients, the NHS said in a press release on Friday. Grail, whose work focuses on solutions for the early detection of cancer, has the support of American billionaires such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
NHS experts say blood tests could be extremely helpful in identifying cancers that are difficult to diagnose and treat early: “Early detection, especially for difficult-to-treat cancers such as ovarian or pancreatic cancer has the potential to save many lives. . More than 1,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every day in the UK, “said NHN CEO Simon Stevens.
The pilot program for the use of this new test will begin in the middle of next year and will involve 165,000 people, of which 140,000 are between 50 and 79 years old who do not present symptoms but who will be evaluated for three years.
The other 25,000 will be people with possible cancer symptoms for whom tests will be used to detect the disease more quickly.
Final results are expected in 2023 and by 2025 the test can be widely used. Grail said in a statement that based on the data obtained, “the use of Galleri has the potential to cut the number of terminal cancer diagnoses by half, significantly reducing the number of deaths from this disease in the UK. by almost a fifth ”.
However, not all oncologists believe that the NHS should carry out this pilot program. Paul Pharoah, a professor at the University of Cambridge, says he has doubts about the effectiveness of this test, in the context of the limited data that has been published. Other experts believe that there should be more testing before starting the pilot program and that the current scientific evidence certainly does not show that the test has the ability to detect cancer early.
