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Questions remain about how to interpret MCED test results. Only certain blood tests can determine which organ the cancer is actually in. Lab tests must be done on potentially cancerous tissue to confirm the diagnosis, but you can’t take a biopsy of someone’s entire body. False positives remain a problem for the entire field of cancer screening, which by design includes reviewing a number of healthy tests to find cancer. Galleri, the furthest MCED on the path to widespread use, incorrectly marked 57 healthy blood samples as cancerous in the aforementioned study.
There’s also the risk of rushing in – some cancers never become invasive or life-threatening, but early detection may require drastic treatments like chemotherapy. Some data suggest that less worrisome cancers actually occur less frequently in the bloodstream, which may minimize this problem.
The NIC trial will help determine how blood test results for cancer should be interpreted and should provide a standardized approach for launching cancer screening efforts as companies flood the field with new tests.
“I don’t think most companies want to compare their tests head-to-head,” he says. Timothy RebbeckA professor of cancer prevention at Harvard, Dr. “This is expensive and difficult. So someone else, a neutral party like the NCI, needs it.”
Rebbeck thinks blood tests in the new trial would be most helpful in cases of pancreatic, liver, and ovarian cancers that often kill and have no other screening method. Still, longer trials are needed to confirm whether the time saved with these blood tests saves lives.
But Rebbeck is optimistic about Cancer Moonshot’s ultimate goal: “It seems very realistic to me to think we can cut deaths by half,” he says.
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