- Grail's Galleri test promises to detect cancer signals in your blood.
- It's good at finding advanced cancers, but can miss early-stage cases.
- Telehealth company Hims & Hers is offering Galleri at a $250 discount, but there's a catch.
A Super Bowl ad airing this weekend by telehealth company Hims & Hers pokes fun at "rich people" and their obsession with living longer.
"All that money doesn't just buy more stuff, it buys more time," the ad voiceover says, a gentle nod toward rich and powerful longevity enthusiasts such as Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Bryan Johnson.
Yet the commercial also argues our "wealth gap is a health gap" and that everyday people should have the same access to high-end biological testing that elite concierge medicine services offer the rich, such as regular blood draws, GLP-1 drugs, and yes, peptides. The latest addition to that mix: cancer screening through a simple blood test.
The new Hims & Hers test, Grail's Galleri, is part of a growing suite of blood tests and more "proactive" care the telehealth company is offering to mere normal folks.
It is not exactly cheap, though. It requires a $350 annual lab membership, which includes tests that measure cardiometabolic health, to assess risk for conditions like heart disease or high cholesterol, and hormone levels. On top of that, customers can pay for Grail's Galleri blood draw at a discounted rate of $700. That's $250 less than the retail price for Galleri, but still $1,050 all in for a test that, based on current data, has limited ability of telling you whether you have early-stage cancer.
Screening for over 50 cancers, with a single blood draw
Grail's test uses two vials of blood to screen for over 50 types of cancer, including some tough-to-find types like pancreatic and ovarian cancer, for which routine screening doesn't exist.
In the US, more than 50% of cancer cases are caught at the later stages 3 and 4, after the disease has started spreading. The ultimate promise of new blood tests like Grail is that many cancers could be caught earlier by looking at a person's blood, instead of waiting for vague symptoms to surface that might initially be dismissed, further delaying diagnosis.
Grail's test works by detecting cancerous DNA that is shed into a person's blood. So it makes sense that it would be better at finding late-stage cancer: If someone has cancer that has just started to grow, there might be no trace of its DNA — yet — from drawing a couple of vials of blood.
What will be important for Grail to show, in the coming years and decades, is that it can definitively improve cancer outcomes and prevent more cancer deaths by finding more early-stage cancer before it's too late.
Can this test save lives?
According to an ongoing study of 35,000 people by the company, the Galleri test is over 99% specific, meaning that if it says you have cancer, there is a very good chance you do have cancer.
However, it may not detect every case: interim results released in October 2025 suggest the diagnostic test detects about 40% of cancers overall. Which means if you do have cancer, there's a worse than 50-50 chance that a Galleri blood draw will find it.
Grail points to the fact that in the same study, its cancer screening led to a "more than seven-fold increase" in the number of cases of breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancer found in a year, including some cancers that may not have been picked up through standard-of-care screenings like mammograms.
"How much more cancer is being detected in the population is what we need to measure to assess the public health impact," the company said in an email to Business Insider.
A 2021 study of the test showed it picked up about 17% of early-phase stage 1 cancers, and more than 90% of stage 4 cancers, the kind that have metastasized and spread to other areas of the body. That uncertainty, especially in early stages, could lull some people into a false sense of security that they are cancer-free when they are not.
Hims & Hers Chief Medical Officer Patrick Carroll said Grail has been educating a few dozen doctors and nurse practitioners at the company on how to convey this to patients.
"They provide really robust information about how to message it, what the test means, what it doesn't mean," he said. "It's a screening, not a diagnostic test."
If Grail ends up helping people find more early-stage cancers that have no other screening tools, like pancreatic cancer, maybe it will help improve death rates and outcomes. There just isn't enough data to suggest it does save lives, at least not yet.
Professor Anna Schuh, an expert in molecular diagnostics at the University of Oxford in the UK, said Galleri's "low pick up rate" for early cancer, and the cost, give her pause, at least for now.
"That in my view makes this approach currently unsuitable for population screening," she said when the latest Galleri trial results were released last October.
Grail founder Jeff Huber, the company's former CEO, recently told Business Insider that he knows this isn't a one-and-done product. He couples his own annual Grail test with a full-body MRI scan, plus the normal age-appropriate cancer screening measures, like colonoscopies, to get a multimodal picture of what's going on in his body.
"It's a compliment" to other cancer testing, he said. "I do feel deeply offended by the current state of things, where Grail is a rich people product."
The 'more affordable' cancer test still costs around $1,000 annually
Carroll, the CMO at Hims & Hers, said the company's patients have been asking for Grail by name for a while.
"Through a lot of internal research with our customers, they're very interested in Grail, and they're very interested in lab biomarker testing," he said.
Hims & Hers was part of a $325 million private placement investment into Grail last October. "It's expensive, but we are also trying to make it more affordable," Carroll added.
Competitors are also starting to emerge. Last September, Exact Sciences, the makers of Cologuard, a noninvasive colon cancer screening test, unveiled Cancerguard, a blood test that also screens for more than 50 different cancers. It's $689.
As a former CMO at Walgreens, Carroll said he's seen many patients (and their employers) pivoting to "high-deductible" health plans where they may end up paying upward of $2,000 out of pocket for lab work.
"We feel if we can keep it below that $2,000 mark or even $1,500 mark, folks are going to make an informed decision about what I'm willing to pay out of pocket for this," he said. "Because quite honestly, they're paying out of pocket for a lot of the healthcare today."
Huber, the former Grail executive, hopes the Galleri test can eventually be available as a "$100 test that's reimbursed" and part of a regular annual checkup. What Hims & Hers is offering is different: a quick telehealth screening with a provider, and then a trip to Quest labs to draw blood, "no connections required," as their 2026 Super Bowl ad says.
