A new and unique approach to cancer screenings may soon lead to earlier detection and treatment. Trials for this revolutionary tool are taking place right now in southeast Louisiana."Well, it really is a game-changer," Dr. Marc Matrana said.It's a simple blood test that tells a patient if they have cancer."If this were widespread, and we used this routinely across the country, we could decrease cancer deaths by as much as 40%," Matrana said. It's not a replacement for traditional screenings, but the goal of the Galleri Test is similar: to catch cancer as early as possible."We know that many cancers show up late," Matrana said. "The symptoms of pancreatic cancer, the symptoms of ovarian cancer often don't appear until patients are at stage four, incurable stages, but by trying to catch these cancers, these incredibly aggressive cancers earlier it becomes more curable."Matrana leads the clinical trials for Ochsner at the Gayle and Tom Benson Cancer Center in partnership with the Grail Company. The test still needs full FDA approval."A positive test almost certainly means that the patient does have cancer, so it's a 99.5% specificity, meaning that if the test is positive, that 99.5% of the time, the patient will have cancer," Matrana said. Here's how the Galleri Test works. It focuses on DNA shed from cells into the bloodstream."What we know now is that DNA degrades differently when it comes from cancer cells as opposed to a normal cell," Matrana said. "We can actually pull a small sample of blood, a tube of blood, pull the DNA from that, look at the different sizes of DNA and determine whether or not it came from a normal cell or a cancerous cell."It also goes a step further by determining the exact type of cancer, screening 50 different possibilities."We often have patients who say, 'gosh, I don't want to know if something's wrong. That would be scary for me,'" Matrana said. "But I always say no, what would be scary is having something bad and not knowing it because if we know, then we can do something about it, then we can intervene." Community response has been tremendous, though the test is not currently covered by insurance and will cost around $800 out of pocket. According to Matrana, the FDA approval process may still take a few years but the test adds another resource in the fight against cancer.Watch the video above for the full story.