BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product Development

Thrive AACR data highlights specificity, sensitivity trade-offs for cancer screening

April 29, 2020 10:15 PM UTC

Data from Thrive’s prospective, multicancer blood test study makes it clear that avoiding false positives is the top priority when screening asymptomatic individuals for rare events. While that inevitably comes at the cost of sensitivity, the company argues that even a low rate of detection is an important advance for the scores of cancers for which no screens are available.

Screening broad swaths of people for a low prevalence disease carries the risk of reporting false positives that lead to unnecessary anxiety, testing and procedures, driving up costs and potential for harm. Minimizing that risk requires setting stringent detection cutoffs, which means some cancers will be overlooked...