The NHS is trialling an innovative new blood test that may be able to detect more than 50 types of cancer. The Galleri blood test, developed by a company called GRAIL, will be piloted with 165,000 patients.

Prior research on patients with signs of cancer has already found that the test, which checks for molecular changes in the blood, can pick up many types of cancer that are traditionally difficult to diagnose early, such as head and neck, ovarian, pancreatic, oesophageal and some blood cancers.

If the NHS programme shows the test also works as expected for people without symptoms it will be rolled out to become routinely available. This test could help NHS England meet one of the aims of the NHS Long Term Plan of detecting 75% of cancers in the early stages, stage I and II, boosting the proportion of cancers caught early, and reducing cancer mortality.

Read more in the PharmaTimes here