Cancer is a major public health problem. The World Health Organization recently claimed that "cancer will overtake heart disease as the world's top killer by 2010, part of a trend that should more than double global cancer cases and deaths by 2030". In 2009, 1 in 4 deaths in the United States was due to some form of cancer.
One of the major problems currently facing the industry in regards to the treatment of cancer is belated diagnosis, which results from technological difficulties to ascertain the existence of cancer during the early stages of its development. Cancer cure rates would improve if the diagnostic tumor marker tests yielded positive results before the spread of the cancer to other parts of the body. Unfortunately, few diagnostic tumor marker tests are observed to be positive before the metastatic spread of cancer. This is most unfortunate since many cancers have a very high cure rate if caught early.
Early diagnosis is an essential element of effective treatment of cancer, and has a huge positive impact on the outcome of cancer treatments. Screening for early cancer diagnosis is a fundamental tool for effective cancer treatment and survival, saving lives and reducing medical costs. Good screening tools should be effective, accurate, simple to operate, and low-cost. When diagnosed early, many cancers today can be readily treated, increasing survival rates dramatically. For cervical cancer, early diagnosis increases survival rates up to 92% when 15% or fewer of those with stage IV cancer are alive after 5 years. In addition to increasing survival, effective early diagnosis can reduce by far the costs to the medical systems, associated with elaborate tests and prolonged and expensive treatments. This is the underlying cause for the increasing resources, government as well as private, which are being made towards early cancer diagnosis.
