Galleri and what the NHS-Galleri trial showed
Galleri is a blood test that looks for a signal shed by many different cancers, including several that have no screening test of their own.
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Galleri is a blood test that looks for a signal shed by lots of different cancers, including many with no screening test of their own. One blood test, a wide net. The big question has always been whether it actually helps, and on 22 September the full results of the two biggest studies came out, in the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine.
The NHS-Galleri trial is the first randomised trial of a test like this. Just over 142,000 people aged 50 to 77 in England gave blood once a year for three years. Half had it tested, half had it stored. The main aim was to cut the number of cancers found late, at stage III or IV, and it didn't: the numbers were about the same in both groups. There were fewer stage IV cancers in the tested group (342 against 397) and the gap grew each year, but not by enough to rule out chance. Promising, not proven.
What it did do was find cancer. Screening picked up 1,173 cancers in the tested group against 290 in the other, more were caught at stages I and II, and a fifth fewer first came to light as an emergency. About 1 in 110 people got a positive result each year and just over half of them had cancer. It pointed to the right part of the body about nine times in ten. The American PATHFINDER 2 study of nearly 36,000 people found much the same, and only 6 in every 1,000 people tested needed an invasive procedure because of a positive result.
Now the limits. It missed around two in three cancers diagnosed within a year of the blood test, especially early ones, so a clear result is reassuring, not a guarantee. It sits alongside your cervical, breast, bowel and lung screening, never instead of it. A positive result doesn't name the cancer, it tells us where to look, and waiting for the scan can be worrying. We don't yet know whether it helps people live longer: the trial wasn't built to answer that, and the longer follow-up will. And it isn't approved by NICE or offered on the NHS.
My take: it's well worth considering, especially for the cancers nothing else screens for, and it works best alongside the screening that's already proven. If you've decided Galleri is right for you, we'd be glad to help. We'll see you first and take the time to go through the test with you, and the blood test itself is done at the clinic in Westfield. Your result usually takes about three weeks. Whatever the result, we'll be with you through what comes next.
Wondering what this means for you? We can help. Talk to a doctor about health checks.
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