|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Guardant Health, a Palo Alto-based company, gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration on a first-of-its-kind blood test to be used for colorectal cancer screenings this month, which is now commercially available.
Stephen Murphy, the senior vice president of marketing at Guardant Health, said that colorectal cancer is the second largest contributor to cancer deaths in the United States.
“What we know is that of the people who pass away from colorectal cancer, about three out of four of them were never screened,” he said. “We’re on a mission to try and get more and more people screened, and the more we can get screened, the more lives we can save.”
The company’s co-founders and co-CEOs Helmy Eltoukhy and AmirAli Talasaz are both Ph.D. graduates from Stanford University, and the company as a whole has a deep connection with the Palo Alto area.
“The Palo Alto community has been good to us,” Murphy said. “We want to make sure we’re good back to them.”
Murphy said that a big factor as to why people don’t get tested is because the other options are “not very pleasant.” With the company’s blood test, it makes getting screened much more convenient, as it only requires a small amount of time to get blood drawn.
“This is convenient, it’s easy,” he said. “We think we can actually make a big breakthrough in terms of reaching people who traditionally haven’t done this before.”
While the test had been previously commercially available, the company launched the test with FDA approval on August 1, and patients have to get a prescription through a doctor to get the test. Because of this, Murphy said they have a sales force connecting with different doctors offices in the Palo Alto area to grow the product’s footprint, which he added will take some time to fully saturate the market.
The approval also allows the test to be reimbursable through Medicare, which Murphy said will have a huge impact, allowing people to get the test who otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
Mike Weist, senior manager of corporate communications, said that while the company believes in its test and has a great success rate, it doesn’t matter unless the test is done.
“People say, well, which is the best test?” he said. “And we think the question should be that the best test is the one that gets done.”
