Triage Colorectal Cancer Screening Test Should Reduce Colonoscopy Referral

The most frequently used first line screening test for colorectal cancer across Europe is the fecal immunochemical test (FIT) and patients with a positive score following FIT tests are then referred for colonoscopy.

However, 94.8% of people who test positive with FIT do not have colorectal cancer and this means there are a significant number of unnecessary expensive and invasive colonoscopies performed, placing a severe burden on both the patient and the healthcare system.

Colorectal cancer is ranked second among all newly diagnosed cancers and responsible for approximately 215,000 deaths in Europe each year. Early diagnosis is crucial as approximately 97% of bowel cancer patients caught at stage I will have an average five year survival rate and most will be cured, while if caught at stage IV the average survival rates fall to 7%. Of the 41,500 patients diagnosed with bowel cancer in the UK each year, only a very small proportion of these are diagnosed with stage I disease, 16% of men and 14% of women. As well as the increased rate of mortality with late diagnosis, there are also significant cost implications as treating late stage disease is often more costly than treating patients with early stage disease.

It has been announced that a blood test, the NuQ Triage Colorectal Cancer Screening Test (VolitionRx Ltd, Namur, Belgium) is expected to receive Conformité Européenne (CE) Marking in late 2016 and will be marketed commencing in early 2017. The test has demonstrated the potential to reduce colonoscopies by 25% while maintaining almost 97% detection of colorectal cancer. There are organized colorectal cancer screening programs in 14 of the 28 EU states with a further 10 states offering some form of public or privately accessible screening.

Cameron Reynolds, MBA, CEO of VolitionRx, said, “Offering European healthcare systems a simple and easy to use blood test which can be used to triage FIT positive populations for colorectal cancer is very exciting as we are coming to market with something that potentially meets a pressing need in many European countries. After much market analysis, we believe that commercializing this product, a single normalized assay, is the quickest way to achieve significant revenue for our proprietary Nucleosomics platform.”

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