A father pulls up in his car, waiting to pick up his kid. As he sits in the driver’s seat, he opens his phone. He smiles, and throws his head back with relief: “No cancer signal detected,” he reads, just as his son climbs in.
This scene appears in a Super Bowl ad that telehealth company Hims & Hers will run this weekend. Last year, Hims ran a controversial game-time clip promoting the company’s weight loss medications to more than 100 million viewers. This time, it’s using part of its minute-long slot to market one of its latest offerings: a multi-cancer early detection test called Galleri.
Grail, the test’s developer, has faced many hurdles as it has worked to validate and market its blood-based test for detecting dozens of tumor types. Galleri and several competing multi-cancer tests have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but their companies are able to market them as lab-developed tests — and increasingly, they have relied on telehealth platforms like Hims to prescribe their products to patients.
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