"No cancer signal detected." The blood test results popped up in my online health portal without much fanfare. A doctor would chat about them with me later, congratulating me on the "phew"-worthy result.
I took the Galleri mult-cancer early detection (MCED) test about a year ago in 2024 as part of my longevity-focused stay at Canyon Ranch, a luxury wellness retreat in Tucson, Arizona. Galleri – which costs $949, and is not currently FDA-approved – is a blood test that studies DNA fragments shed into the bloodstream. Patients need a prescription before pulling up their sleeves.
GRAIL, the company behind Galleri, recently presented findings from a study across 25,000 healthy adults over the age of 50. The test, the company says, found cancers at earlier stages and in organs that don't have routine screening. Galleri discovered cancer signals in 216 people, and 133 of them indeed had cancer. It also correctly predicted the cancer's origin 92% of the time.
"We're able to isolate those DNA fragments, sequence them and look for those tumor-specific markers from the blood," says Megan Hall, the vice president of medical and corporate affairs at GRAIL. If a "cancer signal" is detected, it also provides a cancer signal origin prediction, or a clue to the providers and the patient which organ that signal could be coming from. If that origin was the pancreas, for example, doctors would know where to start looking for the possible cancer.
