The gallery blood test, developed by California-based healthcare company Grail, will be piloted by the NHS with 165,000 patients described as a “world-first deal” in a news release on Friday.
Grail, whose work focuses on early detection of cancer, has the backing of investors, including tech billionaire Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
NHS England hopes that blood tests will be particularly useful in identifying types of cancer that are difficult to diagnose and early on.
“Early screening – especially in hard-to-treat conditions such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer – is likely to save many lives,” said Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive.
More than a thousand people are diagnosed with cancer every day in the UK, he added.
The pilot program, due to begin in mid-2021, will cover 165,000 people, including 140,000 between the ages of 50 and 79 who have no symptoms, but will undergo annual blood tests over three years.
The remaining 25,000 participants will be people with potential cancer symptoms, who will usually be given a blood test to speed up their diagnosis after being referred to a hospital.
Results are expected by 2023, followed by the expectation that by 2025 one million people will receive the test, after which it will expand into a wider population, NHS England said.
In England, about half of all cancers are currently diagnosed in one or two stages, but the NHS aims to increase it to three quarters by 2028, the news release said.
Gray said in a press release that adding the gallery to current standards of care, according to modeling data, could reduce the number of cancers to a diagnosis at a later stage, which could reduce the total number of cancer deaths in the UK. About a fifth. “
The five-year relative survival rate for cancer in the UK is below the European average, according to Charity Cancer Research UK.
Lawrence Young, a professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick, said the gallery test is one of the most novel blood tests for early detection of cancer when it is more easily treated.
“There are many tests to evaluate this approach and the publication of the Circulating Cell-Free Genome Atlas (CCGA) consortium examining the gallery test in 6,689 participants has yielded very encouraging results in more than 50 different cancers at different stages of development.” He told the Science Media Center.
However, not all cancer experts agree that the NHS Gallery should run a blood test.
Paul Farooq, a professor of cancer pathology at Cambridge University, told the Science Media Center that he had doubts about the scientific basis for the pilot based on the limited published research available.
“The gallery blood test is a test that can detect cancer in the blood in individuals with early cancer, although the evidence that it does effectively is weak,” he said. “The NHS should not invest in such testing before it is adequately evaluated in well-managed, large-scale clinical trials.”
Mitchell Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said the tests, developed by Grail, have “great mutable potential” if they prove effective in detecting cancer.
Head of Early Diagnosis at Cancer Research UK Dr. Jodi Moffett said the results so far from studies outside the UK have been promising. “But, for some types of cancer, especially the sample sizes were very small and therefore need to be taken in large quantities, and followed by long-term follow-up of patients by blood testing to understand where that cancer is missing,” he said. .An told the media center.
“Based on the evidence we’ve seen, testing is currently not as good as taking stage I cancer, where it is small and has not spread to other parts of the body.”
CNN’s Amy Cassidy and Sarah Diab contributed to the report.
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