Dr. Putcha on the Utility of Blood-Based Assays in CRC

Girish Putcha, MD, PhD, chief medical officer and clinical laboratory director, Freenome, discusses the utility of blood-based assays in colorectal cancer (CRC).

The AI EMERGE trial (NCT03688906) compared mutation detection based on circulating tumor (ct)DNA and a carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA)-based classifier and showed that a multiomic blood-based screening assay had higher sensitivity and specificity versus singular tumor-based assays in detecting early-stage colorectal cancer, says Putcha.

The sensitivity of the blood-based test was about 90% versus 47% with the ctDNA-based assay, and the specificity was 100% versus 75%, respectively. Furthermore, the sensitivity for the blood-based test was 91% compared to 31% with the CEA-based assay with a specificity of 94% for both assays. These results show that the multiomic approach holds promise for detecting disease in patients with early-stage CRC, concludes Putcha.