Cancer Referral Targets

Lord Patel Excerpts
Monday 5th June 2023

(1 year, 6 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Patel Portrait Lord Patel (CB)
- View Speech - Hansard - -

My Lords, I interrupt to say that, while the new test shows promise, it is nowhere near perfection. The sensitivity of the test is extremely low and false positive rates are high. This is cell-free DNA testing, including machine learning. It may be the promise of five years to come that we detect cancers at an early stage, which would be the holy grail, but we must not hype the test at this point and raise false hope.