2025’s Cancer Dilemma: Finding Tests That Diagnose Cancer at the Right Time

While cancer survival rates continue to improve, common cancers are being detected with increased frequency. There were nearly 2 million new cancer diagnoses in 2022 in the US, which spends $43B on screening each year. The timing of diagnosis is critical for some of the most common cancers, including prostate, colon, breast, cervical, and lung. The reality, however, is that getting an accurate, timely diagnosis can be an uphill battle that takes multiple rounds of testing. As the frequency of late-stage cancer diagnoses rises, clinicians need more accurate and efficient screening methods to address overspending and improve early detection outcomes.

Threading the needle between detection and overdiagnosis

Cancer screening is a critical public health measure that can help reverse the trend of late-stage cancer diagnoses and reduce cancer mortality rates. Cancer caught in later stages is more expensive to treat and more likely to be fatal.

Early-stage (stage 1) lung cancer costs a median of $25,000 to treat and has a five-year survival rate of 56 percent. In comparison, late-stage (stage 4) lung cancer costs almost 10 times as much ($210,000) to treat and has a five-year survival rate of 5 percent.

While it is critical to the longevity of patients that cancer be detected before it enters later stages, detecting cancer that is unlikely to cause illness or progress to high-grade cancer can also be a problem.

Detection of nonactive (indolent) or benign conditions in otherwise healthy patients is referred to as “overdiagnosis” and can cause undue stress while prompting patients to undergo unnecessary treatments. Quality cancer diagnostics should, therefore, be disease-specific and easy to interpret, empowering healthcare providers to make informed decisions regarding patient care. Unfortunately, many “standard” tests do not meet these criteria.

The case for better diagnostics

Improving diagnostics can help fill information gaps and provide clarity other tests may lack. New classes of diagnostic methods can streamline current screening protocols and help physicians make more informed decisions about the best next step. 

In the case of prostate cancer, it isn’t uncommon for doctors to be forced to piece together results from a variety of different tests as they work their way toward a prostate biopsy, the final test needed for a cancer diagnosis. Many doctors begin with the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, a blood test that can serve as a general indicator of prostate problems when levels are elevated.

Because the PSA test is specific to the prostate but not to cancer, physicians screening for prostate cancer must decide what tests to run next, with options such as digital rectal exams (which miss smaller masses) and advanced imaging (which can be hard to interpret), to name just a few options.

With all these options, there is a lingering risk of catching cancer too late, as running multiple tests can require additional time and resources.

Improving outcomes and protecting resources with improved diagnostics

Innovative new diagnostic tests have the potential to change the landscape of cancer screening.

For example, new blood tests used in prostate cancer screening look specifically for protein isoforms produced by prostate cancer cells. By providing results more closely tied to biological processes indicative of cancer, these tests can refine the biopsy decision-making process and provide clinicians with more clarity as to which patients are at the highest risk of prostate cancer. 

When implemented, these blood tests led to a 55 percent reduction in unnecessary biopsies for men with an elevated total PSA (≥4 ng/mL). In some cases, decision-making can be further clarified by pairing improved testing with imaging methods such as MRIs.

The path toward improving a patient’s outcome begins with a fast and accurate cancer diagnosis. Adopting new tests that can help physicians refine their decision-making and diagnostic process can have a massive impact, reducing the number of patients undergoing invasive testing, conserving healthcare resources, and focusing efforts on patients likely to have clinically significant cancer.