Just how expensive could it be to screen populations of people for cancer using blood tests? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A blood test capable of detecting multiple cancers seems like a dream come true, yet a new study looking at such a test used in populations of people failed to find cancers earlier, and also delayed diagnosis for others. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says such a strategy is also breathtakingly expensive.

Nelson: This issue of an early test that you give a lot of people that creates a lot of medical effort afterwards is clearly going to consume more resources. Overall if you're going to deploy a test like this even if it were to work you would have to think about what that means. Not just on the test itself and there was an estimate from the paper that $949 test if the United Kingdom deployed this to the people who needed it would cost them almost $20 billion a year just for the tests. But you also have to think of all the downstream things you would need to do.     :31

Clearly more work is needed to make such tests practical, Nelson concludes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.