A novel blood test has shown promise for colorectal cancer screening.
The "multiomics" test, under development by Freenome, has previously been shown to detect early-stage (I/II) colorectal cancer with a sensitivity of 94% and a specificity of 94%.
A new study shows that it can also detect precancerous lesions, colorectal advanced adenomas (AAs).
"The ability to detect advanced adenomas is incredibly important because we can remove them before they become cancerous," said senior author Aasma Shaukat, MD, MPH, chief of gastroenterology at Minneapolis VA Health Care System and professor of medicine, the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in a statement.
At the Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium (GICS) 2021, she presented data showing that the novel test was able to detect AAs with a sensitivity of 41% and a specificity of 90%.
This sensitivity of the new test is better than or similar to that of currently available stool tests, noted study author C. Jimmy Lin, MD, PhD, MHS, chief scientific officer at Freenome.
The new test had almost double the sensitivity for detecting AAs (41% vs 24%) as the fecal immunochemical test (FIT), and its sensitivity was comparable to that of FIT-DNA testing (41% vs 42%).
In addition, it showed much higher sensitivity (41% vs 22%) for detecting AAs than the Epi proColon, a screening blood test that has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for detecting methylated septin 9 DNA (mSEPT9).
