Rich & Staci’s Experience with the Galleri test

[Rich] My name is Rich and this is my story with Galleri.

I live in New Jersey with my family. 

[Staci - Rich’s wife] Hi, I'm Stacie and I'm Rich's wife. We live in New Jersey with our two kids and our two dogs.

[Dr. Thomas] I'm Dr. Brian Thomas. I've been practicing here in East Windsor for about 20 years in internal medicine. Rich has been my patient for many years.

As a father, he had a lot of concerns about staying healthy with his family and keeping up with all the traditional screenings for a man his age, such as prostate cancer and colon cancer screening. So this was a discussion about something more that we could potentially offer him.

[Rich] My brother-in-law mentioned to me that he had taken this Galleri test, which screens for many of the deadly cancers. I obviously had some questions and he said that our doctor, Dr. Thomas, was offering it through the office and it was just a blood test.

[Staci - Rich’s wife] I asked Dr. Thomas, you know, is it something that you recommend that I take as well? And he said absolutely.

[Dr. Thomas] I commonly offer the Galleri test to people over 50 and those at higher risk. So many of the cancers that Galleri is able to screen for don't have other good screening tests, and typically for most of them people do not get diagnosed until they're later in illness and the treatment options are more limited.

[Rich] So I said yeah, I'm on board. I didn't think too much about it at that point. You know, I just figured it's going to be negative, but let's be on the safe side and do the test anyway.

And about a week later we got a Cancer Signal Detected result with a predicted cancer origin for lung.

I was just—my wife and I both—the whole family was beside ourselves. There was really nothing in my family history that would lead me to believe that I would get cancer one day. It was really so far in the back of my mind. It just wasn't an issue.

[Staci - Rich’s wife] If anybody was going to test positive I thought it was going to be me, not him. You know, my family has a history of cancer, his really doesn't. So when his came up positive, I was just absolutely shocked.

[Dr. Thomas] After receiving the Galleri report, we pursued a CT scan of Rich's chest, which ended up showing an abnormality consistent with concern about lung cancer. Due to the nature of the scan, I set Rich up with a thoracic surgeon who saw him quite promptly and talked through the options.

Ultimately, a tissue biopsy was needed in order to confirm what was going on in that area of abnormality.

[Rich] So my cancer was stage 3B, which means that it had progressed to the lymph nodes.

The surgeon got us on the schedule. I started chemo and then I had the surgery. And the surgery went very well.

The surgery took a toll, but I managed fine with the help of my wife and family. I then completed the chemo as well and that sort of ends that story there.

Having been diagnosed with a stage three lung cancer and undergoing successful treatment, it's now about two and a half years since this Cancer Signal Detected and there's no sign of recurrence for Rich.

[Staci - Rich’s wife] My mom passed away from cancer and we didn't know that she had cancer. Galleri wasn't available at that time. There was no early screening.

By the time you realize you have lung cancer, it's often too late to do anything about it. You know, we miss her every day and I just think had this been available, things may have turned out a lot differently.

[Rich] I think some people want to convince themselves that there's nothing wrong. I could have easily done that and just opted not to take the test.

But I would have never known. I would have gone about my life just as I was normally doing.

Once you know what's going on, you can prepare for it, you can treat it, and hopefully you come out on the other side.

[Rich] Really from the bottom of my heart, I say thank you. 

Based on a clinical study of people ages 50 to 79 around 1% are expected to receive a Cancer Signal Detected result, which includes a predicted Cancer Signal Origin. After diagnostic evaluation, around 62% of these people are expected to have a confirmed cancer diagnosis. 

The overall sensitivity in study participants with liver/bile duct cancer was 93.5% (100% for stage I, 70.0% stage II, 100% stage III, 100% stage IV).