Colon cancer blood test

Targeted Diagnostics & Therapeutics Inc. (TDT) announced recently that it has received regulatory approval to begin offering its new blood test, called GCC-B1, for the detection of recurrent colon cancer. TDT has been certified under the Federal Clinical Laboratories Improvement Amendment of 1988 (CLIA '88) for high-complexity laboratory testing. TDT says its new test represents a major breakthrough because its detection mechanism finds metastatic colorectal cancer that is often missed by other methods. The company says that GCC-B1 can find one cancer cell in 10,000,000 normal cells by detecting the presence of guanylyl cyclase C (GC-C), which is found on metastatic colorectal cancer cells. Detection of the presence of this marker in the blood is indicative of recurrent metastatic colon cancer. In ongoing clinical testing, the GCC-B1 test has been shown to have as high as 100 percent sensitivity and 91 percent specificity, according to TDT.