Grail: Pan-cancer blood screening test for circulating tumor DNA
grailbio.com
grailbio.com
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So I just took a crack at the concept PDF and the rest of the literature on the site, and there's nothing that I can find which mitigates the risk of flagging a slow-growing or self-regressing tumor as something worthy of attention.
I say this because mammogram recommendations were only recently changed due to the potential adverse health risks stemming from treating tumors which might never progress to a severity warranting treatment [1] as well as tumors which might spontaneously regress [2]. If some of the newer oncology theories suggesting high tumor occurrence and anti-cancer immune responses are correct (my google-fu didn't help me here, so someone else might want to help me with the source), then as a result of Grail, you might start having a bunch of people freak out and undergo unnecessarily heavy treatments for tumors which might otherwise never become cancerous.
That said, I could be entirely wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're specifically working on mitigating this risk as one component of making this screen viable.
[1]http://www.webmd.com/breast-cancer/features/new-mammogram-sc...
[2]http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=77344...
Until we have perfect chemotherapy, local treatment with surgery and radiation will remain standard of care. To perform those, you need to know where the tumor is.
I find the utility of this test will be in monitoring for recurrence, perhaps reducing the standard every 3 month restaging examinations; however, once it starts going up, you'll need advanced imaging again to see if it's local or metastatic recurrence.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_...
> George Church of Harvard University, one of the expert judges for the 30 Under 30 project and one of the fathers of next-generation DNA sequencing, reviewed the paper and thought that many of the key claims that had been made of Andraka’s sensor – for instance, that it was 168 times faster, 26,667 times less expensive, and 400 times more sensitive than existing technologies – may not hold up, or at least require more work to be proven. I sent the paper to five more top scientists, who reviewed it, for the most part, anonymously. Most saw holes and said the results did not match the glowing accounts reported, well everywhere.
0: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-bio...
A couple of years ago while promoting his book in the south bay, Peter Thiel spoke about his experience with scientist-lead biotech companies: "While engineer-lead companies are sometimes poor in terms of business sense, scientist-lead companies tend to be catastrophic".