None of this year’s Super Bowl ads approached the sublime hilarity of Doritos’ 2013 “Goat 4 Sale” (google it … it is worth your 30 seconds). But one ad this year did make me laugh out loud, though not from a place of humor. Hims & Hers — a direct-to-consumer “lifestyle health” company — was hawking a new product that “screens for 50+ cancer types in one simple blood test.” The test is named “Galleri,” and it sifts through a blood sample for bits of cancer-related DNA modifications spilled into the circulation from tumors developing secretly around the body. I am no oncologist, but I keep up enough with cancer research to know that this is a sudden huge leap from the research lab bench to the direct-to-consumer healthcare market.
It turns out that the Galleri test is developed and sold by medical DNA sequencing company GRAIL, but Hims & Hers are offering it on behalf of GRAIL at a discount. This particular catalog item by Hims & Hers stands out a bit awkwardly among their other product offerings, which focus primarily on sexual function/dysfunction, hair loss, mental health, skin, and weight loss (via GLP-1 knock-offs). However, their Super Bowl ad certainly brought them wider attention from many people, including the worried well and investors.
Unfortunately for both GRAIL and Hims & Hers, the results of a large, long-term study of Galleri’s effectiveness undertaken by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) were released just a couple of weeks after the advertisement. The test failed to reach its primary endpoint (i.e., proving that earlier detection would cause a reduction in later-stage cancer diagnoses). The GRAIL press release about the results tries hard to spin a more positive story, but press releases are written to put the best possible lipstick on any pig. GRAIL is extending the study a few more months hoping for improved findings but even if such results materialize, the damage to reputation and stock price is going to take time to repair.
To be fair, the stated intent of Galleri is noble: detecting different forms of cancer as early as possible, resulting in easier and more effective cancer treatment. But this widely shared belief is more of a statement of faith than irrefutable scientific fact. Frankly, when it comes to human biology and disease, we only understand somewhere around 5% of the biological circuitry of “normal,” much less diseases like cancers. It is going to take a heck of a lot more knowledge than just a list of cancer-associated DNA snippets hanging out in the blood to make accurate diagnoses, prognoses, and — ultimately — treatment decisions.
There is a larger, disturbing phenomenon that is demonstrated by the Galleri story. It can be summed up by the Aristotelian principle that “nature abhors a vacuum.” In the Galleri case, a bit of increased knowledge about cancer genomics gained from recently available DNA sequencing tools was used to build an incomplete test, package it as a major health breakthrough via slick marketing, and throw it into the vacuum of cancer ignorance and fear. Not great for patients or science.
Normally I would be reassured by the fact that good scientists actually thrive in the vacuum of biological ignorance, asking questions and designing experiments to help answer them based on reality. Brick-by-brick they are building over time an edifice of knowledge to replace that ignorance. New AI tools (at least some of them) and new laboratory techniques to measure human biology may accelerate that construction. Yet the very scientists and institutions that are working the hardest to overcome biological ignorance are also the ones who have had their legs cut out from under them by the current U.S. Administration through their ravaging of agencies such as NIH and NSF that are charged with providing the resources to do this critical work.
This wanton choice to stop biological knowledge-building by defunding it is also reflected in the vacuum of science-based leadership at the top of our formerly worldclass human biology research institutions. Being a vacuum, all manner of deeply unserious people holding those ideas are flooding in — e.g., the most recent Surgeon General nominee — seeking to impose their inane beliefs to further slow, if not entirely stop, the whole reality-based research enterprise.
One laughs to keep from crying.
Read more on Boulder Daily Camera
