Screening for haematological cancers is costly and time-consuming. The standard screening procedure, which looks for mutations in four specific genes, costs about $300 and can take seven to 10 days to return complete results. To allay the costs involved, many hospitals wait for a batch of samples from multiple patients before running the test. Precipio, based in New Haven, has now advanced the state of care with the commercial launch of HemeScreen, a novel proprietary test for mutations in haematological cancers.
Importantly, the HemeScreen assay can deliver results in four to six hours rather than days, enabling a same-day turnaround time. Equally important, the HemeScreen assay also costs a fraction of the current technologies to run. At $100, this is about one-third of the cost of the traditional method, making the potential savings substantial.