Lung Cancer Home Health Screening Tools May Aid in Triaging LDCT+ Patients

A convenient and accessible noninvasive home health tool, such as FirstLook, may help address the unmet need of low lung cancer screening use, particularly with low-dose computed tomography (CT), according to Ali H. Zaidi, MD.

CancerNetwork spoke with Zaidi, medical director of Esophageal and Lung Research at the Allegheny Health Network Cancer Institute, about advantages with cfDNA liquid biopsy testing over low-dose computed tomography (CT).

He first explained that the convenience and accessibility of high sensitive home health tests can address the unmet need of low uptake of low dose CT. Then, he expressed that FirstLook, a home health test, would ideally be used in conjunction with lose-dose CT as a shared decision-making tool to triage low-dose, CT-positive patients. He suggested that this would help diagnose and treat patients based on the severity of their disease state.

To illustrate this idea, Zaidi alluded to the colorectal screening landscape, with screening rates observed in the 60% to 70% range. He claimed that the adoption of home health tools, such as fecal immunochemical (FIT) and fecal occult blood tests (FOBT), was largely responsible for high utilization of colorectal cancer screenings. Additionally, these tests enable more effective community screening, which enables triaging of patients to the treatment regimen that fits their disease state.

Zaidi suggested that such an approach could be adopted into the lung cancer space, which would hopefully increase screening use and better triage patients to procedures that match their evaluated risk.

Transcript:

There is a huge unmet need in this space, due to the low uptake of low-dose CT. A noninvasive, point-of-care test that is highly sensitive can address this by being convenient and accessible. However, [as] I mentioned previously, FirstLook is being envisioned as an adjunct, rather than as a replacement to low-dose CT, meaning it is going to ideally be used as a shared decision-making tool to triage patients who have positive [results with] low-dose CT programs. This automatically allows you to configure the capacity constraints while covering other barriers as well.

As a perfect example of such an approach, if you look at colorectal cancer screening, [their] rates have gone in the 60% to 70% range, primarily due to the adoption of home health accessible tools like FIT and FOBT, which allows you to do community screening more effectively and then triaging patients, which are high risk, into gold standard colonoscopies. That way, you are directing care to the people who need it vs preventing a higher procedural risk on patients who may be low risk. This would be an easy comparison to the fit with the way it was deployed within the colorectal space and used as such.