A new project through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, aims to create an at-home cancer screening test that can detect more than 30 types of Stage 1 cancers using breath or urine samples.
"So many Americans do not have access to cancer screening, particularly underserved communities," Renee Wegrzyn, director of ARPA-H, said in an Aug. 1 news release on the effort. "Access to a low-cost cancer screening test that does not need a lab test is so critical to preventing late-stage diagnoses, increasing survival rates, and reducing high treatment costs."
If successful, the program, dubbed POSEIDON, will create a test capable of integrating with electronic health records and connecting patients with a healthcare professional via telemedicine within 96 hours. The agency plans to award funding for POSEIDON based on the quality of proposals it receives.
Many existing multi-cancer-early detection tests are unable to accurately identify Stage 1 solid tumors. A test that is capable of doing so could lead to significant improvements in outcomes and lower treatment costs for the more than 40 million Americans projected to be diagnosed with late-stage cancer over the next 30 years.
ARPA-H, part of the National Institutes of Health, is a federal agency created in 2022 to support breakthrough biomedical health and research.