13-05-2025
Kate Walsh Talks About Multi-Cancer Early Detection Testing
Grey's Anatomy star Kate Walsh discussed her parents experiences with cancer and her own cancer ... More scare and the importance of detecting cancer early. (Photo: Courtesy of HelloMMC)
Grey's Anatomy star Kate Walsh called this decision a 'no brainer' in both a serious and punny way. It's her decision to team up with the company GRAIL to advocate for more multi-cancer early detection testing in a campaign they're calling 'Generation Possible.'
Now MCED, short for multi-cancer early detection, isn't exactly a term that's already bandied about regularly like 'OMG' or 'IYKYK.' It's a newer term that may at first sound quite technical. But breaking the term down to its component parts can help understand what it is. 'Cancer" along with 'early detection' means trying to catch cancer in its early stages before it's spread and becomes much more difficult to treat. 'Testing' implies some kind of test to do this.
And "multi-cancer' means a test that can look for multiple different cancers at a time. This is in contrast to tests like mammography, colonoscopy or prostate specific antigen blood levels that look for cancer in just very specific parts of the body. You wouldn't, for example, use colonoscopy to look for lung cancer, unless you somehow weren't paying attention and inserted the scope in a very wrong place.
Walsh is serious about the early detection of cancer in large part because of what happened to her parents. Her father was diagnosed with late stage lung cancer. 'It was not detected early enough and he succumbed unfortunately to cancer a year and a half later, quite young." Walsh recalled. "He was just three days short of his 61st birthday.' That was over three decades ago when Walsh herself was only 23.
Her mother had a different experience with cancer. 'My mother survived breast cancer,' Walsh recalled in a recent conversation. 'She was diagnosed at 62, but they caught it early enough to where she had double mastectomy where she was able to live cancer-free for another 30 years. We were very fortunate.' Walsh also mentioned a good friend from high school who died of breast cancer.
Here's the punny part. GRAIL now has a multicancer detection test that's commercially available. Walsh explained, 'This technology has never been available before, it was not there in my parents' generation,' hence the name of the campaign Generation Possible. 'It was a no brainer to work with GRAIL,' Walsh added. 'I should say pun not intended since I did have a brain tumor, which was very fortunately not cancerous, ten years ago.'
Yes, Walsh had her own cancer scare in 2015, when Walsh was in her mid-40s. The first symptoms that came to a head, so to speak, were rather subtle. 'I was just exhausted and then I got more and more tired.' Her Pilates trainer then noticed that her right side was dipping. Not in a 'hip dip' Pilates move type of way. But in a what's-going-on type of way.
It took a while for her to act on these various symptoms, which she attributed to 'American can-do and stoicism. I'm sure it's just, you know, tired. Or I just did a big TV show, I burned myself out. I was working out really hard I burned myself out.'
But eventually after 'all these little subtle markers" got 'more and more pronounced,' she got an MRI of your brain. 'And then lo and behold I had a pretty sizable tumor in there," Walsh recounted. "So, three days later I was in surgery and had it had it out and thankfully they were able to get all of it and it was benign.'
It turned out to be a meningioma. A meningioma is a non-cancerous overgrowth of the meninges, the tissues that wrap around the brain sort of like Saran Wrap around a tomato. Except that one's brain is a bit more important than a tomato.
Kate Walsh starred as Dr. Addison Shephard in ABC TV's medical drama series "Grey's Anatomy." Here ... More she is pictured with Ellen Pompeo, who played Dr. Meredith Grey, and Patrick Dempsey, who played Dr. Derek Shepherd. (Photo by Craig Sjodin/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
In general, waiting for symptoms to appear before getting checked for cancer is not a good proposition. It's a bit like waiting for your house to fall into pieces before doing something about a termite infestation. Cancer is when some cells in your body start to grow abnormally in an uncontrolled manner. If you catch these calls early enough, you may be able to pluck them out or kill them before they spread anywhere else. In these early stages, though, many cancers don't cause any symptoms. Symptoms really start emerging after the cancer has spread, which, in turn, can significantly decrease the chances of successful treatment. It can be much tougher to get each and every cancer cell out of your body.
On top of that, people can delay going to the doctor. After all, the words 'I have a doctor's appointment' aren't typically followed by a 'Woooo.' Even Walsh, who played Dr. Addison Montgomery in the TV series Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice, has had a very common reluctance to see doctors. 'For someone who played a doctor on TV for the better part of a decade and back and forth over the years, I never really liked going to the doctor,' Walsh said. 'I really did the bare minimum."
After her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Walsh did start advocating for people to get cancer screenings such as mammograms. 'But I still get nervous and intimidated [during doctor's appointments],' Walsh related. 'I always say to people, bring your husband or wife or a partner or a friend to ask questions that you might forget to ask or take notes, because I think it's anxiety provoking, you know? It's not a friend to friend conversation. There's an awe about doctors.'
When you don't go to the doctor regularly or are like a deer in headlights during the appointment, you may not end up getting screened for cancer properly. Currently, the American Cancer Society recommends the following:
In addition, you can get screened for skin cancer with the doctor searching your body for suspicious looking stuff.
If you notice, though, that's only a small fraction of the over 200 possible cancers that people could possibly get. For most other cancers, there historically has not been ways to detect them early.
The Galleri test is now commercially available. GRAIL is seeking FDA approval of the test. (Photo: ... More Courtesy of GRAIL)
That's prompted researchers to try to find some sort of detectable signal that is present across different cancers at their early stages. It's helpful to find something that is common in many different cancers because you want the screening to be as practical as possible. It could get a little daunting if a doctor were to say, 'OK, get ready for the over 100 different scopes to be inserted into different parts of your body.' It's also good to have tests as painless as possible. Because who wants more pain in life.
All of these motivations have given rise to the MCED concept. GRAIL has been advocating for MCED because, naturally, they have a commercially available test aiming to do the MCED thing. GRAIL's Galleri test looks in blood samples for DNA fragments with certain methylation patterns suggestive of cancer. The test is based on the fact that all cells in your body, healthy or otherwise, shed their DNA to varying degrees. That can leave various fragments of DNA circulating through your bloodstream.
These DNA fragments can be methylated to varying degrees. Methylation is when a methyl group consisting of carbon and hydrogen atoms gets attached to the DNA molecules in your cells. A cell uses such methylation to turn on and off sections of its DNA, in turn, changing what proteins the DNA codes for at the time.
Josh Ofman, MD, MSHS, is president at GRAIL, chronicled how the concept behind the Galleri test arose by accident: 'It really dated back to 2015 at Ilumina. The origin story was they did a big study with about 125,000 pregnant women.' The study was part of Illumina's testing of their non-invasive prenatal test that entailed checking pregnant mothers for genomic abnormalities. 'There were 10 cases where the DNA just looked really abnormal,' said Ofman. 'The medical director at that time was a guy named Rick Klausner, who was the ex head of the National Cancer Institute, and he said you only see the abnormal DNA like this in cancer." Ofman continued with, "They called those 10 women back and all 10 of them had an asymptomatic cancer. And that's when the light bulbs went off in Illumina.' Illumina subsequently spun out GRAIL to develop the technology that could test for DNA fragments with methylation patterns that are indicative of cancer.
That eventually led to the Galleri test that was launched as a commercial product in 2021. A big test of the test conducted from the end of 2019 through 2020 was the PATHFINDER study, a prospective cohort study of 6,662 folks 50 years of age and above who didn't have at the time symptoms suggestive of cancer. Results from PATHFINDER as described in a GRAIL press release alongside a publication in The Lancet in 2023 found the test to be 97% accurate in detecting cancer.
Now, commercially available doesn't necessarily mean readily financially available to everyone. While you or your employer can currently pay for the test if either of you have the cash to shell out, insurance typically won't cover it yet. Ofman said that they are in the process of trying to get FDA approval of Galleri, 'Where we hope to become the first multi early detection test that has an FDA approval.'
Of course, GRAIL isn't the only place working on MCED stuff. Other scientists around the world are trying to find different ways to catch more cancers earlier and more efficiently with less invasiveness. There is a big need for such things as cancer is one of the leading causes of death around the world, accounting for nearly one in six of all deaths, according to the World Health Organization. And the rates of cancers like prostate cancer continue to rise, especially among younger people.
Therefore, it is a 'no brainer' to want more ways to detect more different cancers earlier as Kate Walsh does. It is also a 'no brainer' to ensure that more people get access to cancer screening technology. With further scientific research—assuming that science gets the proper amount of support and funding—and more support of screening tests, all of these things may become increasingly possible for the current generations and beyond.
