https://www.fastcompany.com/90593114/how-a-surprising-discovery-turned-into-a-promising-new-early-detection-test-for-cancer

There’s a joke among science aficionados that goes like this: “What did Watson and Crick discover? Rosalind Franklin’s notes.”

Well, I have a joke for you. What did the cutting-edge $8 billion revolutionary cancer-diagnostics company @GrailBio discover?

Answer: My mom’s proof of concept.

My name is Dr. Elana Miller, and I just wanted to do some helpful fact checking for this article in @FastCompany about @GrailBio. First, the unnamed “pathologist” mentioned who made the surprising discovery is a woman and my mom, Dr. Meredith Halks Miller.

She was quite able to figure out all by herself (before presenting the data to her male colleague, who seems to get all the credit here) that the DNA signals on pregnant women’s tests were coming from undetected cancer rather than from chromosomal abnormalities of the fetus.

In fact, as Laboratory Director at Illumina, she encouraged the clinical consulting staff to mention to the women’s doctors that an oncology work-up might be needed for their patients.

And I’m also quite sure — and this is more of a technical point — that it was 2013 when this discovery occurred, rather than 2014, because I remember distinctly that it was December 17, 2013 when I was unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV T-Cell ALL at 31 years old.

Despite hearing that her only daughter might imminently die from cancer, my mom had the wherewithal and insight to bring a testing kit to my hospital bed, where she asked the wonderful staff at UCLA to draw my blood at bedside into the specially prepared tube.

She wanted to see if any DNA signals from my cancer cells could be detected on the test and potentially used as a marker later to see if my treatments worked. My mom and I also realized that while an awesome test like GRAIL’s has the power to revolutionize cancer detection,

it also has the potential to revolutionize treatment. My type of cancer, for example, required 3 years of chemotherapy, and my mom could tell you after taking care of me for much of that time that chemo is no picnic.

What if testing the blood for DNA signals (which is much more sensitive than a PET scan) could be use to modify chemotherapy regimens, shortening regimens for people who don’t need the full 3 years?

My mom went on to write, as senior author (along with several other key women, like Drs. Bianchi and Chudova), the article that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA… maybe you’re heard of it)

on her discovery, titled “Noninvasive Prenatal Testing and Incidental Detection of Occult Maternal Malignancies,” which was published in 2015. There was so much publicity about the article that Illumina shares spiked in one day, adding about $2B dollars of value to Illumina.

She put the finishing touches on it while also picking up my medications from the pharmacy and driving me to doctor’s appointments and cleaning my vomit off the floor when I couldn’t quite make it to the bathroom. Oh, and she was also working full time at Illumina

(the company from which GRAIL was spun). Eventually she became the Founding Laboratory Director at GRAIL and helped with the development and implementation of GRAIL’s Galleri test until her retirement last year.

My mom is more forgiving about this stuff than I am, perhaps because when she became a physician, sexism in medicine was overt and rampant, rather than now, when it’s merely implicit and tolerated.

When my mom applied to medical school, for example, many medical schools, including Yale, stated that they did not want to admit women, and when my parents decided to adopt me, my mom was unceremoniously fired from her academic position as a neuropathologist at UCSF.

Her boss told her, “You’ll be a great mother, Meredith; therefore you will be useless to my department.”

Things aren’t as different now, though, as they should be. My mom was initially not encouraged to join GRAIL as Laboratory Director because she didn’t have the right “phenotype” for the job. That’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one.

So don’t mind me @FastCompany @GrailBio… just your neighborhood fact checker trying to set the record straight.

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