Former White House economist: science has delivered a cancer detection revolution, now the FDA must keep pace

Cancer is the leading cause of death among Americans ages 45 to 64.

Two major reasons why are that we find most cancers too late and our cancer-screening system remains remarkably narrow.

Start with the status quo, which nobody should defend.

Routine screening exists for only a handful of cancers.

Together, recommended screening programs catch only about one in seven cancers diagnosed in the United States.

Nearly 70% of cancer deaths come from cancers for which there is no recommended screening test at all.

Pancreatic, ovarian, liver, stomach, esophageal and blood cancers often reveal themselves only after symptoms appear, when the disease has progressed and treatment options have narrowed.

New multi-cancer early detection, or MCED, tests are designed to help close that gap.

Rather than looking for a single cancer in a single organ, they analyze signals in the bloodstream associated with many different cancers.

They examine the whole person.

The Food and Drug Administration will soon make an important decision around how it evaluates this technology as it considers Galleri, an MCED blood test developed by GRAIL.

The agency should give a careful, clear-eyed, pragmatic look at the evidence.

These tests are new.

They will miss some cancers.