After being diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer, Jason McGrath is launching a blood test nationwide for the third-most common form of cancer in the U.S.
Two years ago, McGrath, a U.S. Air Force veteran who fought in the Iraq War, was a healthy 42-year-old playing basketball when he felt stabbing pain in his stomach and started turning green.
He drove himself to the emergency room, which sent him home saying he just had constipation.
Later that night, he started vomiting, and was rushed to the emergency room yet again. This time he was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer.
Two days later, he underwent a complex colectomy surgery, where surgeons removed 12 inches of his colon.
He lost 52 pounds while getting 22 rounds of chemotherapy at Arizona Oncology.
While he was in rehab, he started thinking about how more needs to be done to get people screened. Today, most people aren't eligible for a colonoscopy until they're 45 years old.
"A lot of people don't want to do fecal-based testing and are skipping their colonoscopy," he said.
Insurance companies only pay for these tests every three, five and 10 years, he said.
"It creates this huge gap," he said. "Cancer is not going to stop growing based on your schedule."
His mission is to provide more options for advanced screening "so people don't end up like me."
Acquisition leads to test rollout
Last November, his Tucson-based company CashLabs LLC acquired Beacon Medical, a Phoenix startup that had been working on an affordable blood test for the early detection of colorectal cancer.
The colorectal cancer test is now available at Any Lab Test Now, which has more than 215 locations nationwide.
"Beacon Biomedical didn't have the marketing arm, software or experience to take the company national like we did," McGrath said.
CashLabs is a national direct-to-consumer laboratory platform.
"Colon cancer screening can be a life saver," said Joan Koerber-Walker, president and CEO of the Arizona Bioindustry Association.
"Arizonans have had access to the BeScreened Colorectal Cancer test for several years," she said. "Now, thanks to Any Lab Test Now, people across the United States can also benefit by getting screened using this Arizona health innovation."
Beacon's BeScreened-CRC test is 94.6% accurate, McGrath said.
While insurance companies don't cover the test, it is available for $349.
"One tube of blood gets your results in under 10 days," McGrath said.
Beacon Biomedical is a CLIA-accredited laboratory.
Rather than seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market the product, BeScreened is a CLIA Laboratory Developed Test.
"It would take millions of dollars and five to seven years for the FDA route," McGrath said. "If you look at five tests in the market as a whole, four out of five are LDT, including us."
