Results from a study by Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Virtual Annual Meeting II, showed the company's Lunar-2 blood test can detect early-stage colon cancer.
Lunar-2 uses blood to detect cell-free DNA from tumor cells using three different types of changes seen in tumor DNA compared to normal DNA. After training the test on known samples, the study tested blood blinded samples from 113 patients who were known to have colon cancer and 88 patients who were deemed negative for colon cancer by colonoscopy.
In the study, Lunar-2 had a sensitivity of 90%, meaning it detected 90% of patients who actually had colon cancer. The test had a specificity of 96.6%, meaning it correctly identified 96.6% of patients who didn't have the cancer.