Cancer Screening Today: Traditional Tests, Liquid Biopsies, and SpotitEarly’s Breath-Based Breakthrough

Cancer screening has come a long way, but for many people, the word "screening" still evokes anxiety, discomfort, and complicated scheduling. What if we told you that the future of cancer detection could be as simple as breathing into a mask at home? At SpotitEarly, we're working our way to make that future a reality. But first, let's explore where cancer screening stands today and why a revolutionary approach is so urgently needed.

The Current State of Cancer Screening: Effective but Limited

Today's cancer screening landscape presents a mixed picture, with remarkable successes and significant gaps. Currently, guideline-recommended screening options exist for only five types of cancer: breast, cervical, colorectal, prostate, and high-risk lung cancer. While these represent about 40% of total cancer cases in the U.S., they account for only 14% of cancer diagnoses when you factor in test performance and patient compliance. Perhaps most sobering is this statistic: about 70% of all U.S. cancer deaths occur in cancers with no recommended screening options.

Traditional Screening Methods: The Gold Standards

Mammography for Breast Cancer

Mammography has been a true success story, reducing breast cancer mortality by 25% in its first 18 years and preventing an estimated 384,000 to 614,000 U.S. deaths between 1998-2021. However, it comes with several challenges: for every million tests, mammography produces about 100,000 false positives, creating anxiety and unnecessary follow-up procedures for many women. Additionally, mammography involves radiation exposure with repeated screenings, and its effectiveness is significantly reduced in women with dense breast tissue, where tumors can be harder to detect against the dense background.

Pap Tests for Cervical Cancer

The Pap test represents one of medicine's greatest screening victories, reducing cervical cancer death rates by approximately 70% since its introduction. By detecting precancerous lesions, it can actually prevent invasive cancer from developing. Yet it still requires a clinical visit and produces about 74,000 false positives per million tests.

Colonoscopy for Colorectal Cancer

The percentage of adults receiving recommended screening for colorectal cancer has generally increased. It rose from 44% to 65% from 2000 to 2010. As of 2018, that figure stood at 68.8%.  Colorectal cancer mortality rates have dropped significantly, by 57% from 1970 to 2022, due to reductions in incidence, earlier detection through screening, and improvements in treatment. It's highly effective at both detecting cancer and preventing it by removing precancerous polyps. However, it's also invasive, requiring sedation and carrying risks like bowel perforations and bleeding. Alternative stool-based tests are less invasive but suffer from low patient compliance and produce about 123,000 false positives per million tests.

Low-Dose CT (LDCT) for Lung Cancer

LDCT screening has shown a 20% reduction in lung cancer mortality among high-risk individuals (current or former heavy smokers). However, it involves radiation exposure and produces about 128,000 false positives per million tests. Most concerning, lung cancer still has one of the highest rates of late-stage detection at 65.5%.

PSA test for prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is a significant global health concern, ranking as the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men. While the 5-year survival rate for localized or regional prostate cancer is nearly 100%, it drops significantly to 37% for distant-stage disease, highlighting the critical importance of early detection. PSA testing has helped cut prostate cancer mortality in half since the early 1990s, but its benefits are mixed. While screening can detect aggressive cancers early, it also produces many false positives—up to 80% of elevated PSA results, leading to unnecessary biopsies, anxiety, and potential complications. As a result, most guidelines now recommend individualized decision-making rather than universal screening.

The Next Generation: Multi-Cancer Blood Tests

Recognizing the limitations of single-cancer screening, the medical community has been developing Multi-Cancer Early Detection (MCED) technologies, primarily through liquid biopsies. These blood-based tests analyze circulating tumor cells and cell-free tumor DNA that cancers shed into the bloodstream.

Grail's Galleri Test Grail leads this space with its Galleri test, which can detect signals from more than 50 cancer types. It demonstrates impressive 99.5% specificity and can localize cancer signals with 93% accuracy. However, its sensitivity varies dramatically by stage: only 16.8% for Stage I cancers, rising to 90.1% for Stage IV.

Other Players in the Field Companies like Exact Sciences (with CancerSEEK/Thrive), Guardant Health (Shield), and Freenome are also developing blood-based MCED tests. While promising, these technologies face common challenges: lower sensitivity in early stages, complex biomarker analysis, and questions about physician adoption and insurance coverage.

SpotitEarly's Revolutionary Approach: The Power of Breath

This is where SpotitEarly's breath-based cancer detection represents a genuine paradigm shift. Our LUCID platform combines the extraordinary sensitivity of canine olfaction with AI precision to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that cancers release, compounds so subtle that only the most sensitive detection methods can identify them.

Why Breath Testing Changes Everything

Unmatched Ease of Use

Our test involves simply breathing into a disposable mask for a few minutes – that's it. No needles, no preparation, no sedation, no radiation exposure. You can do it at home, eliminating the barriers that keep many people from getting screened: clinic visits, time off work, anxiety about procedures, or the complexity of preparation.

Exceptional Early-Stage Accuracy

In our Rainbow Study involving 1,386 participants, we achieved what many thought impossible: 94.8% sensitivity for early-stage cancers (stages 1-2). This is precisely when detection matters most for patient outcomes. Our overall performance yielded 93.9% sensitivity and 94.3% specificity for the four primary cancers for which our system was trained to detect: breast, lung, colorectal, and prostate.

Multiple-Cancer Detection

Unlike traditional methods that screen for one cancer type at a time, the SpotitEarly test, using a single breath sample, can detect multiple cancers simultaneously. We're initially focused on the most common cancer types: breast, lung, prostate and colorectal, which account for almost half of all new U.S. cancer cases. Still, our platform showed 81.8% sensitivity for 14 other cancer types not included in our primary training, suggesting shared VOC patterns across many cancer types.

The Promise of Early Detection

The difference between early and late-stage cancer detection is often the difference between life and death. Early detection can substantially increase survival rates. Yet current screening methods, despite their effectiveness, leave significant gaps in coverage and accessibility.

SpotitEarly's approach doesn't aim to replace any existing screening methods; it's designed to complement them and fill the crucial gaps. For people who avoid screening due to invasiveness or cost, and for those seeking convenient, comprehensive cancer detection, breath testing represents a new frontier.

Looking Toward a New Standard of Care

The future of cancer screening isn't just about better technology; it's about removing barriers that prevent people from getting screened in the first place. When cancer detection is as simple as breathing into a mask, we can imagine a world where regular multiple-cancer screening becomes as routine as checking your blood pressure.

At SpotitEarly, we're not just developing a new test; we're working toward a world where cancer is detected before symptoms appear, where screening is accessible to everyone, and where the anxiety and barriers associated with cancer detection become things of the past.

The technology exists. The need is clear. The future of cancer screening is here, and it starts with something as natural as breathing.