The Truth About the Super Bowl Ad Cancer Test | Separating Hype from Reality

The Galleri test promises early cancer detection. Here’s what the math shows.

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Episode Description:

You may have seen the Super Bowl Hims & Hers cancer test ad - where they showed a simple blood test.

“No cancer detected.”
Relief.

The Galleri multi-cancer early detection test sounds like a breakthrough — and in many ways, it is.

But when you look closely at the actual numbers behind this liquid biopsy, the story becomes more complicated.

In our newest post, Dr. Chaplin breaks down:

• What the test actually detects
• Where it performs extremely well
• Where it struggles
• And why a negative result may not mean what you think

If you’re considering multi cancer early detection — or wondering whether this replaces traditional screening — this is worth a few minutes of your time.

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info@elevatingcancertreatment.com

https://elevatingcancertreatment.com

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Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical advice. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard or read in this podcast or on this channel.
Reliance on any information provided by Dr. Jay Chaplin or Elevating Cancer Treatment is solely at your own risk. Dr. Jay Chaplin is a scientist and drug developer, not a medical doctor providing patient care. The content presented here reflects general scientific understanding and research, and may not be applicable to your individual health circumstances. Individual medical conditions and treatments vary, and no two situations are exactly alike.
Always consult with your personal healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment plan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I know I'm late to the game, ha, but the Super Bowl ad about the rich live longer by Hems and Hers caused a bit of a kerfuffle. A lot of folks wanted to know about the Gallieri test for early cancer detection, specifically multi-cancer early detection. That's the way they bill it, M C E D. And I'm here today to tell you that there are some really fantastic things about it, and as usual, some things that are really awful about it. And unless you dig into the numbers, science, math, it's boring but important, unless you dig into the numbers, you can have some really, really rude surprises. So stick with me. We're gonna go through what the Gallieri is, how it works, and what you should know about whether this test is reliable or not. In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. Stick with us. Hello, and welcome to Elevating Cancer Treatment, where we explain the science and debunk myths to help you navigate your health journey. My background is a little different. Beyond educating about cancer, I'm actually designing new drugs that are defining the future of oncology. This direct hands-on experience offers me a very different perspective of how these cancer treatments work on the body, interact with the cancer cells, and cause side effects. And these are insights that I'm excited to share with you. If that sounds interesting, make sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. And please share it if you find it useful. I'm Dr. Jay Chaplin. An important reminder, I'm a PhD, not an MD. The information in this video is education and it's not medical advice. Every cancer is unique and no general information applies to everyone. Please remember that. Always consult with your healthcare provider for guidance on your specific situation. And two quick things. First, as a thank you for being here, I've created a free resource, 10 things to elevate your chemo journey, which you can download from the link below. And second, by signing up, you'll also get updates on that innovative cancer treatment I'm working on. I'm confident it represents a significant advancement in immunotherapy. So please take a moment, download your free guide, and join us in shaping the future of cancer treatment. So again, if you saw the Super Bowl ad about the rich living longer, there's a tiny snippet in there about early cancer detection. A guy looks at his phone, a screen pops up, no cancer detected, he's ugh, relief. How reliable is this? Depends on what you're looking at. So the Gallieri test, which is the one being offered by hims and hers, is from a company called Grail, which is a part of Illumina. And Illumina is a front runner in DNA sequencing. And what this test is, is they take a blood sample, it's not an invasive thing. They take a small blood sample and they send it off and they do some sequencing work and they look for circulating tumor DNA. It's not even cells, it's little bits of DNA, shredded up bits of DNA floating around in your bloodstream, and there are particular signatures that are fairly unique to different types of cancers. So if those are detected in your blood, it probably means that you have that cancer. That's what the screening test is based on. And Illumina is a great company for this. They've been providing state-of-the-art equipment for decades, really, really, really good. This test has some serious drawbacks. Despite those drawbacks, I'm rather excited about it, and I'll tell you why. Right off the bat, Americans, I can't speak for other countries, Americans are not great at getting screened for cancer. And it's really, really important. As we've talked about before on this channel, the earlier you get diagnosed and the earlier you get treated, the higher your chances are of a really good outcome. A lot of cancers are curable at stage one, a little less curable at stage two. They're a lot harder to treat at stage four. So you want to catch them as early as possible. And we're not great at getting screened. Roughly 32 million women get screened for cervical cancer each year. That's pretty good. It's a decent number. And only about 20 million of you get a PSA test. So not doing so great. Men, come on. In general, the other big one, colorectal cancer, we're lagging there. That's bundling together men and women. We've got 80 million adults in the age bracket for colorectal cancer screening, and only about 21 million get screened. Not great. Again, early detection is key for really good, relatively easy and curative treatment. So it would be lovely to get more and better screening. And the Gallieri test is a step in that direction. One thing that's really nice about the Gallieri test is that it covers a large number of different cancers. There are some that are really exciting. Pancreatic cancer in particular. One of the big issues with pancreatic cancer is that it's often asymptomatic. You don't know about it until it's stage four. It's metastasized. If you can catch it early, that is a fantastic benefit. Now, the Gallieri test plays a little fast and loose. Take a look at the sheet of cancers that it can detect yourself and see for yourself if those really look all that different to you. Some of those seemed uncomfortably close and a bit of a false distinction. Regardless, having things like pancreatic cancer in there is really, really, really good. The more breadth we can get with these tests, the better. So again, with assays, with tests like this, it's boring but important to dive into the math. And there's two things that you really want to know about with a test like this. One is the false positives. How often does the test say that you have the disease and you don't? Because that's really scary for no reason. And how often do you have false negatives? The test tells you you don't have the disease, but you actually do. That gives you a false sense of security. You really don't want either of those. But always in building one of these tests, you've got a couple of factors at play. If you try and have as few false negatives as possible, it's going to drive up your false positive rate, and vice versa. And if you try and get both of them really, really, really low and make a really awesome test, you can do that, but it's going to be insanely expensive. So there's always this interplay between false positives, false negatives, and price point. And we'll come back to the price at the end because there's an important caveat there. So the Gallieri test has a very, very low false positive rate. 0.4%. That means 99.6% of the time it detects a cancer, you've actually got cancer. More importantly, because it's detecting a large number of cancers. It says 50, it's probably more like 40. Still, more than 80% of the time when it detects a cancer and it says it's a particular type, it's actually that type, which is really, really good because that means that you can go in for further diagnostic screening, figure out where that cancer is, and track it and treat it appropriately. This is all fantastic. Now, here's where things start to get less fantastic. The false negatives. This is a test that is billed as multi-cancer early detection. And again, ideally you want to detect cancer as early as possible. That's what something like this would be really good for to do it earlier in your life and get good screening. So early, we'll come back to that, and false negatives. When people get tested with this, there is a huge emphasis on early detection. That's how they're billing this. If you look at their webpage, and you'll see a snippet of it here, but you can go to it, we put a link down below. It hypes early detection. 54% of all cancers found by the Gallieri test were early, stage one or stage two. That sounds really impressive. That's a mathematical trick. So this false negative rate is pretty high. How high? It's 48%. That means that 52% of the time, more than half of the time, if you have a cancer, the test is going to miss it and tell you that you don't have it. So that guy in the ad who got the message on his phone and he's all relieved, that relief is not warranted. It's great, but this test is designed to give you almost no false positives at the cost of having quite a few false negatives. If you have cancer detected by this, you know that it's true and you can find out what kind it is. That's great. But if you get a negative result, it doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's like a flip of a coin. So that half and half detection rate is broken out by different stages. And again, for a test that builds itself as early detection, it does spectacularly poorly with early detection. Why is that? It actually makes a lot of sense. You're looking for DNA in the bloodstream. The earlier the stage, the fewer cancer cells there are, the fewer of them that are dying, the fewer sites there are. If it's stage one, you've got one little tumor someplace, you don't have metastatic disease all throughout your body, it's going to be a lot harder to detect at stage one than at stage four. This all makes sense. This is what you would expect, and this is what comes out in the numbers. So, 52% of cancers are missed by the test overall. How does that break down with the stage? At stage four, where there's a ton of cancer and it's spread throughout your body, the Gallieri test is really, really good. Its false negative is only about 10%. If you have stage four cancer, it will catch it 90% of the time. That's pretty darn good. If you have stage three, it's a little less good. You have a 23% miss rate. So you get 77% of the cancers detected. That's still pretty good. But again, this is being marketed and emphasized as early detection. Stage 2 plummets, it has a 60% false negative rate. That means that only 40% of stage two cancers are caught by the test. For every 100 people with stage two cancer who take the Gallieri test, 60% of them get told you don't have cancer when they actually do have it. And stage one, by far the worst. Stage one has an 84% false negative rate, meaning only 16% of stage one cancers are caught by the Gallieri test. So again, 100 people come in, 100 people take the Gallieri test, they've all got stage one cancer, and 16% of them get an accurate detection, and 84 of them get told they don't have cancer when they do. So this is a test that is great for telling you that you have cancer. If you get a positive result, it means something. And if you get that positive result, it can tell you what kind of cancer and where to look. It can also pretty much give you a good example of what stage it's at. It takes a lot of the guesswork out. But if you get a negative result, it doesn't necessarily mean anything, particularly for early cancer where this test is billed. Now, partially because of this and partially because of testing hasn't been done yet, this test is not FDA approved. It is CLIA approved. It is a test run on clinical samples in clinically approved labs. It is a solid, reasonable, reputable test. It is a good test. If you have the money for it, I would highly recommend it because even with a false negative problem, better detection is always worth it. And because it's not FDA approved, it's only CLIA approved, your insurance is not going to pay for it. So unfortunately, financial decisions are a part of healthcare. And this test is $950 out of pocket. Insurance will not cover it. Again, if you get a positive result, it's very clear, it's very accurate, that's incredibly worthwhile, particularly for cancers like pancreatic that normally don't have any screening. But this is not a substitute for other screening tests. This is not a substitute for cervical cancer, for breast cancer, for prostate cancer, for colon cancer. Please keep getting those. Those tests are far more accurate. The fact that the Gallieri test includes those should not give you a false sense of confidence. Use it for the extras, use it for the pancreatic cancer, use it for the other cancers that you normally don't have representation, Merkel cell carcinoma. Use it for those and use it for another way to do early detection. If you can afford to pay $950 out of pocket, test earlier before your insurance starts covering regular screenings as you age into those brackets. This is something that because it's out of pocket, you can do essentially at any time. But just know it's an add-on, not a substitute, because there is a huge false negative problem. Keep that in mind. Screen early, treat early, and we'll be back with you in the next episode with something more that you can add on to your treatment stack. Because if you're here, you're probably not screening, you probably already have cancer and you're looking for an edge. We'll give it to you next time. Beyond these videos, if you need more personalized guidance or a deeper dive into specific treatments to have your treatment be as effective as possible, I offer one on one sessions and medical advocacy. You can find information on our website, which is linked down below. Again, if you found this video informative, please give it a thumbs up, click the notification bell, and subscribe to our channel for more science based cancer insights.