Blood-based colorectal cancer tests show improved detection and survival rates

New clinical data presented at the American College of Gastroenterology 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting highlights advancements in blood-based colorectal cancer (CRC) screening.

Freenome has updated its SimpleScreen CRC blood test, improving its sensitivity for detecting advanced precancerous lesions (APLs) from 13.7% to 18.2%. The updated version maintains an 80.4% sensitivity for colorectal cancer. These improvements were achieved through assay modifications to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio and algorithm refinements designed to detect circulating tumor DNA at the base-pair level.

Separately, research involving Guardant Health’s Shield test suggests that blood-based screening may be more effective than traditional stool-based methods at averting deaths and increasing follow-up colonoscopies. Lifetime modeling indicates that blood-based screening could result in 679 colonoscopies per 1,000 simulated individuals, compared to 113 for fecal immunochemical testing (FIT) and 326 for multitarget stool DNA (mt-sDNA) testing. The study also projected that blood-based screening averted 12 CRC deaths per 1,000 individuals, surpassing the results of FIT and mt-sDNA.