Dive Brief:

• A single blood test was able to detect multiple cancer types at early stages with a low false positive rate in study results presented this weekend in a poster at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago.
• The test also identified where the cancer originated in the body in 90% of cases, according to developer Grail.
• The company, whose high-profile backers include Amazon and Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates, Alphabet venture arm GV, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene, Merck and McKesson, said it would move forward in developing the test toward commercialization based on the data.

Dive Insight:

FDA last month granted breakthrough device designation to Grail’s methylation technology to detect multiple cancer types and identify where in the body the cancer originated, using a proprietary database and machine-learning algorithms. Armed with FDA’s blessing and more than $1.5 billion in equity financing raised, Grail is forging ahead in its quest to bring an early-detection cancer test to reality.

The company is not alone, however, in this pursuit, and will have competition from a number of other players working to bring blood-based cancer tests to market including Guardant Health, Exact Sciences and Verily-backed Freenome.

Menlo Park, California-based Grail reported data for its next-generation sequencing (NGS) test from an initial analysis of 2,301 patients that showed an overall detection rate of 55% for more than 20 cancer types across all stages. The detection rate for 12 of the most lethal cancer types was 76%.

Broken down by cancer type for stages I through III, detection rates were 59% for lung cancer, 74% for colorectal cancer, 64% for hormone receptor negative breast cancer, 70% for lymphoma, 78% for pancreatic, 86% for head and neck, 71% for multiple myeloma, 67% for ovarian, 76% for esophageal, 68% for liver, 79% for anorectal and 78% for gastric.

Detection at early stages in the 12 deadliest cancer types was 34% at stage I, 77% at stage II and 84% at stage III.

The test determined the tissue of origin in 94% of the 20 cancer types and 76% of the 12 deadly cancer types.

The data presented at ASCO represented a subset of Grail’s Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas study that has enrolled about 15,000 patients with and without cancer in the United States and Canada.