Multicancer Early Detection (MCED) represents a new and exciting paradigm for the early detection of cancer, which is the leading cause of death worldwide. Current screening tests, recommended for only five cancer types (breast, lung, colon, cervical, and prostate), are limited by a lack of complete adherence to guideline-based use and by the fact that they have cumulative high false positive rates. MCED tests agnostically detect cancer signals in the blood with good sensitivity and low false positive rates, can predict the cancer site of origin with high accuracy, can detect highly lethal cancers that have no current screening tests, and promise to improve cancer screening by improving efficiency and reducing the overall number needed to screen. Herein we outline this promise and clarify several published misconceptions about this field.
Keywords: circulating cell-free genome atlas; methylation; multicancer early detection.