If you’re over 50 years old, there’s a good chance you’ve had a colonoscopy. But you’re just as likely not to have had one, even though physicians have begun to recommend people have one after they turn 45.
People avoid colonoscopies because the business of snaking a camera inside your colon to look for cancer is a hassle, it's expensive and invasive.
“And so what we really need is a super simple, at-home sample collection test to tell somebody, you’re very likely to have colon polyps, and you really do need to do a colonoscopy,” said Momo Vuyisich, chief science officer for Viome Life Sciences.
Viome Life Sciences, a Seattle company, has formed a partnership with Scripps Research in San Diego to try out a new colon cancer test on people who are also getting colonoscopies. The company is using RNA sequencing paired with an AI computer analysis to find out if people have polyps.
Polyps are the fleshy bumps or stalks that grow inside your colon where cancer can take hold. Mostly they’re benign but they can be a threat as colon cancer becomes more and more common.
If any polyps are found during a colonoscopy, they’re surgically removed.
There is a commonly used stool-sample cancer test people can send into a medical lab. But while the current ones do detect colon cancer, they don’t detect precancerous polyps.
Amy Lightner is a colorectal surgeon and a professor at Scripps Research. She said the current stool test is not enough to safeguard your health.
“If it’s negative, people typically feel assured that, 'Well, my test was negative so I don’t have to get a colonoscopy,'” Lightner said. “But the challenge is that the test is not telling you about any polyps or precancerous lesions that are really important to remove.”
Undetected polyps remain in the colon. The ones that are malignant can become invasive cancers. Detection of cancer after it begins to spread is unsafe and in some cases it could be too late.
Vuyisich said they plan to examine 1,000 people who will have colonoscopies to see if their stool test and AI program are just as good as a colonoscopy at finding polyps.
“OK,” he said, as if speaking to the AI program.
“Here are 300 people with polyps and 700 samples from people without polyps. Go ahead and learn what are the molecules associated with each one of them, so that when we give you an unknown sample, you can tell us with very high accuracy whether the person has polyps or not.”
Scripps Research is recruiting San Diegans to be a part of the study, which will take place in the coming year.
Lightner said the new test kit would be very much like the existing one people send into their health care providers. Except this cancer screener would be able to see whether you have polyps.
“We know the more we screen, in terms of large population levels, the more we reduce the mortality from colorectal cancer,” she said.
The device created by Viome will need regulatory approval before it’s available.
The occurrence of colorectal cancer has increased dramatically in recent years.
It's now the most common cancer found in men under 50. It's the third leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States among both men and women.
