GRAIL Inc has formed a partnership with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK to pilot the use of GRAIL's blood test to detect multiple different types of early stage cancer, the healthcare company revealed on Thursday.

Galleri will be made available to UK patients starting in 2021 under a commercial partnership programme which aims to confirm the test's clinical and economic performance as a precursor to its routine use by the NHS.

The pilot will involve approximately 165,000 people in the UK, including 140,000 over the age of 50 without any suspicion of cancer. The second patient group will include 25,000 people aged 40 and above with suspicious signs or symptoms of cancer. Based on data from the pilot programme, access to the test could be expanded to around one million people across 2024 and 2025 and a larger population thereafter.

According to GRAIL, in a clinical validation study in the United States an earlier version of Galleri detected over 50 types of cancer with a low false positive rate of less than 1% through a single blood draw. Modelling data suggests that adding Galleri to existing standard of care has the potential to decrease the number of cancers diagnosed at late stage by nearly half, which could reduce the total number of cancer deaths in the UK by approximately one-fifth.