Mayo Clinic Oncologist Minetta Liu, M.D. was involved in the development of the new test.
“Today, many cancers are found too late, leading to poor outcomes,” says Dr. Liu. “The ability to detect cancer early is critical to successful treatment.”
Cancer is expected to become the leading cause of death in the U.S. this year. Currently recommended cancer screening tests only cover five cancer types and screen for a single cancer at a time. In fact, there are no recommended early detection screening tests for other cancers, which account for 71% of cancer deaths.
Researchers used the Galleri test in the Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas (CCGA) Study, a prospective, observational, longitudinal study designed to characterize the landscape of genomic cancer signals in the blood of people with and without cancer. In the study, the Galleri test demonstrated the ability to detect more than 50 types of cancers — over 45 of which have no recommended screening tests today — with a low false-positive rate of less than 1%.
According to Dr. Liu, when a cancer signal is detected, the Galleri test can identify where in the body the cancer is located with high accuracy — a critical component to help enable health care providers to direct diagnostic next steps and care.
Nancy Amato had surgery to remove a tumor in her pancreas, then began an innovative program developed at the Skip Viragh Center for Pancreatic Cancer at Johns Hopkins to activate her immune system to prevent the cancer from recurring.
The ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, known as the Pan-Cancer project, is an international collaboration with the aim of identifying common patterns of mutation in more than 2600 whole cancer genomes from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). It builds upon the previous work of those initiatives, which focused primarily on the regions of the genome that code for proteins.
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in December of 2019 in China, the microbe ripping across the globe, its uncontrolled spread in the United States …
This dizzying cascade of events overwhelmed hospitals and forced physicians in the trenches to figure out on the fly how to treat a mystifying disease caused by a new virus.