How early cancer screening benefits life insurers and policyholders

A health care company is teaming up with life insurers to help solve what it calls “a $201 billion problem in America” – late-stage cancer treatment.

Grail is a company on a mission to detect cancer early, when it can be cured. The company recently began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Grail also is working with several major life insurers to offer its Galleri multicancer early detection test to their policyholders. Galleri is the first-of-its-kind test that uses a single blood test to look for a signal shared by more than 50 types of cancer.

Grail has an exclusive distribution partnership with Munich Re to offer Galleri through its network of brokerage general agencies and independent marketing organizations.

“This is about an innovation in early detection. Because health and wellness grow with wealth building and retirement,” Toni Sova-Corfee, Grail’s enterprise sales leader for independent distribution, told InsuranceNewsNet. “That is the connection for the life insurance industry.”

Cancer causes 50% of death claims

Cancer is the leading cause of death for life insurance policyholders, with about 50% of death claims resulting from cancer, Sova-Corfee said.

“That's why this is a relevant conversation for the life insurance industry and for the agents and advisors selling these products. Fifty percent of death claims coming from cancer is striking, and we should be able to do something about it. Agents and advisors approach the business with technical tools, protection products, risk products, savings, etc. But what they're really doing is helping their clients make good decisions around how they're going to spend their time for the rest of their lives.”

Having the 'cancer conversation' with clients

The ”cancer conversation” is an important one that advisors must have with clients, she said.

“We know that one in two men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, and one in three women and one in five people are going to die from cancer. And your risk of cancer is 13 times greater if you’re over 50. That's a greater risk than if you had been a career smoker, or were medically obese, or had family history of cancer.”

Although cancer screenings such as mammography or colonoscopy have been available for decades, those screenings are available for only five types of cancer – breast, uterine/cervical, prostate, lung and colorectal, Sova-Corfee said.

“Those five cancers represent only about 30% of cancer deaths,” she said. “The remaining 70% of cancer deaths are from cancers for which there’s no screening. They’re found in the late stages where there is no treatment. We know that when cancer is found early, the survival rate is about 89% as opposed to 21% when found in the late stages.”

One advantage Grail’s Galleri test has over existing screening methods, she said, is that it screens for multiple cancers at once.

Galleri searches for circulating cell-free DNA in the blood, Sova-Corfee explained.

“All the cells in your body shed DNA into your bloodstream,” she said. “What our AI and machine learning and technology has been able to do is, we can identify methylation patterns in the blood. So we can see, for instance, a healthy kidney’s cell-free DNA has a particular pattern or a unique fingerprint tells us that's a healthy kidney. That same kidney with a tumor on it has a different fingerprint. And we know that it's a fingerprint of a kidney tumor. So when blood is processed in our lab we're looking at more than a million pieces of information in the blood.”

Savings for insurers

The Galleri test has been used by several large-group employers who self-fund their health insurance plans, Sova-Corfee said.

“So you can imagine the savings they could experience because late-stage cancer treatment is expensive,” she said. “There are tremendous savings for those employers to offer a Galleri test to their workers as an employee benefit.”

Life insurers are offering the Galleri test to their policyholders outside of a wellness platform, Sova-Corfee said. Nine insurers are currently offering it and another six are expected to begin offering it before the end of the year.

However, she said, Galleri is never offered for underwriting for risk selection. It is permitted to be used only as a post-issue benefit.

Life insurance policyholders who want to take the Galleri test are given a code to go to the company’s website and request a test. The test is mailed to the policyholder who takes it to one of Grail’s vendor providers to collect the blood. From there, the blood is sent to Grail’s lab.

“There is a tremendous mortality savings for the insurer when cancer is detected early,” she said. “That’s a good thing for the life insurance company’s profitability.”

With the Galleri test able to detect cancer before it metastasizes, “we’re extending that individual’s lifespan for probably another five years or more,” Sova-Corfee said.

“Think of what that would mean to the life insurance industry from a mortality and savings aspect, but also as a value-add to an advisor’s clients,” she said. “If your advisors recommended you take the test and they found cancer early, you would never leave that advisor and you would make sure everyone knew about them.”

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Susan Rupe is editor in chief, magazine, for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].