This $1,000 Test Finds Signs of Cancer in Your Blood

Doctors, researchers and patient advocates are excited about a new blood test that promises to detect cancer early. They disagree about whether you should actually use it yet.

The $949 Galleri liquid biopsy can screen for more than 50 types of cancers. It works by looking for a shared cancer signal in DNA shed by tumors in the bloodstream. More than 130,000 of the prescription-only tests have been sold since Galleri became available in June 2021, according to the test maker Grail, a unit of the gene-sequencing company Illumina.