Colonoscopy? How About a Blood Test?

Nobody likes getting a colonoscopy. For the people who catch colon cancer early thanks to that bowel camera, the standard screening—every 5 to 10 years from age 50 to 75—proves invaluable. For the 993 people in 1,000 who don’t test positive following a colonoscopy, the pain (and for the uninsured, the expense) can be enough to make them skip the next one. People who’ve shirked their exams often number among the 50,000 Americans who die from colon cancer each year. “More non-​invasive ways of screening are needed,” says Matthew Kalady, co-director of the colorectal cancer program at the Cleveland Clinic. “If you could pick up colon cancer early and noninvasively with a simple blood test, that would be just fantastic.”

An Israeli health-tech company is trying to use machine learning software to do just that. ColonFlag is the first product from Medial EarlySign, and while poorly named, the software identifies individuals with 10-fold higher risk of undiagnosed colorectal cancer at curable stages, according to a 2016 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. ColonFlag compares new blood tests against a patient’s previous diagnostics, as well as Medial’s proprietary database of 20 million anony​mized tests spanning three decades and three continents, to evaluate the patient’s likelihood of harboring cancer. Israel’s second-largest health maintenance organization is already using the software, and Medial (a mashup of “medical” and “algorithms”) is working with Kaiser Permanente and two leading U.S. hospitals to develop other uses for its database and analysis tools.