Daily US Times: The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is to pilot a simple blood test that may detect more than 50 types of cancer.
The NHS hoped that it could help thousands of people by allowing the dangerous disease to be treated more successfully at an earlier stage.
The Galleri blood test, developed by Californian healthcare company Grail, whose work is focused on detecting cancer early, will be piloted with 165,000 patients in what the NHS described in a news release Friday as a “world-first deal” in a news release Friday.
Grail is backed by investors including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and tech billionaire Bill Gates.
NHS England hopes the blood test will be particularly useful in identifying different types of cancer that are currently difficult to diagnose and treat early.
NHS chief executive Simon Stevens said: “Early detection — particularly for hard-to-treat conditions like ovarian and pancreatic cancer — has the potential to save many lives.”
He said more than 1,000 people are newly diagnosed with cancer every day in the UK.
The pilot program is due to start in mid-2021, will involve 165,000 people and it will including 140,000 aged from 50 to 79 who have no symptoms but will have annual blood tests over three years.
The news release said the remaining 25,000 participants will be people with possible cancer symptoms who will be offered the blood test to speed up their diagnosis after they are referred to hospital in the normal way.
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