On December 6, 2021 GRAIL, LLC, a healthcare company whose mission is to detect cancer early when it can be cured, reported a partnership with Alignment Health Plan, a national Medicare Advantage health plan from Alignment Healthcare (NASDAQ: ALHC), to provide its Medicare Advantage members access to Galleri, GRAIL’s groundbreaking multi-cancer early detection blood test (Press release, Grail, DEC 6, 2021, View Source [SID1234596509]). Based in Orange, California, Alignment Health Plan is the first Medicare Advantage plan to offer the Galleri test as a complement to recommended single cancer screenings.
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"Providing innovative benefits to support the health and care needs of our members is what we do here at Alignment," said Dawn Maroney, markets president, Alignment Healthcare, and CEO, Alignment Health Plan (CA). "Taking preventive measures before signs and symptoms appear is key to finding cancer early when it is most treatable. We are excited to partner with GRAIL to provide seniors the tools they need to proactively manage their health."
New and existing Alignment Health Plan members who enroll in select HMO and PPO plans in California and North Carolina1 will have access to Galleri beginning Jan. 1, 2022. Galleri is available by prescription only.
"GRAIL is thrilled to partner with Alignment Health Plan to offer our first-of-its-kind Galleri test to a population that by age alone has an elevated risk of developing cancer," said Dr. Josh Ofman, president and chief medical officer at GRAIL. "Providing access to a technology that can detect cancer signals in the blood, even before symptoms appear, can help us decrease the burden of late-stage cancer diagnoses. We commend Alignment for its innovative and proactive approach to early cancer detection for Medicare Advantage members."
In a clinical study, Galleri demonstrated the ability to detect more than 50 types of cancer, over 45 of which lack recommended screening tests today, with a low false positive rate of less than 1%. When cancer is detected, Galleri can determine the cancer signal origin with high accuracy.
More than 600,000 people died from cancer last year in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. This is in large part because the majority of cancers are found too late when outcomes are often poor. Recommended screening tests save lives, but only cover five cancer types in the U.S.: breast, colon, cervical, prostate, and (in high-risk adults) lung. In fact, about seven in ten cancer deaths have no recommended early detection screening.