Breaking New Ground in Multi-Cancer Screening
For most cancer patients, it’s their symptoms that will send them to the doctor and cancer diagnosis, as most cancers have no guideline-recommended screening tests.†1 There is a pressing need to detect more cancers at earlier stages when the disease can be more effectively treated and positive outcomes are more likely. Simply put, we need more high-quality screening options to detect cancer as early as possible.
The good news is significant progress is being made to solve this problem. Exact Sciences is undertaking the most rigorous scientific approaches to develop a blood test that can screen for multiple types of cancers at once.
At the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO®) Annual Meeting, the company shared the first-ever, long-term analysis from an MCED study, the landmark DETECT-A trial.
The follow-up data confirms Exact Sciences’ approach to multi-cancer early detection (MCED) testing, demonstrating that earlier detection through MCED testing enabled treatments intended to cure patients. All patients diagnosed and treated for Stage I or II cancers remain cancer-free more than four years later, and most of those detected cancers had no standard of care screening tests.
To learn more about this data and our unique approach to multi-cancer early detection testing, hear from Dr. Tomasz Beer, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of MCED at Exact Sciences.
What are the next steps for our MCED program? As we continue to make progress towards developing an MCED test, the research & development group is hard at work refining and finalizing the assay design. We’re collecting the final set of samples from people with cancer and from people without cancer, a so-called case control study.
Once that’s done, we’ll be able to launch prospective studies evaluating the performance of the test, with the intention of carrying out a randomized MCED study designed to seek FDA approval for our test.
† Calculated using estimated new diagnoses and deaths from cancers that have standard of care screening: breast, cervical, colorectal and lung (high risk) against all sites
1. Ref: Siegel RL, et al. CA Cancer J Clin. 2023;72:7-33
