[nl]

Is that the case for all cancers though?

I live in Australia, and we are indoctrinated to check your skin for moles that maybe cancerous. There are claims that the high rate of early detection leads to higher survival rates[1].

My understanding is that early detection of bowel, breast and prostate cancer is relatively easy and produces good outcomes too.

There are radical ways to do early detection (sub dermal computers continually monitoring, etc etc) but there are ugly hacked solutions that just might work, too.

How much would it cost to build a toilet with a bowel cancer test kit built in?

[1] http://www.cancer.org.au/policy/positionstatements/sunsmart/...

[Gatsky]

Not sure what you are arguing here... if you are arguing that screening for cancer can be useful and saves lives, then I agree with you!

If you are arguing that a start up could have come up with a screening program for bowel cancer for example, then I don't agree with you for the stated reasons.

Also: Prostate cancer screening is not recommended (http://www.cancer.org.au/File/PolicyPublications/Position_st...)

Breast cancer screening is not as useful as you would hope either. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F14651858.CD001877.pub4) 2000 women need to be screened for 10 years to save 1 life, with 200 initial false positives requiring biopsy. Also, I see lots of people diagnosed with breast cancer despite having mammograms.

Radical ways to do early detection are fine, but you have to prove that it works and that requires a lot of people for a lot of years and a lot of money.

Building a toilet with a bowel cancer screening kit built in is a form of behavior modification to improve uptake, and that is a great area for start ups to get involved in. pg was talking about something different however.

[nl]

pg was talking about something different however

See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour.

Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.

Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.

I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood. There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women, anyway).

I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer. Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them sent to the laundry.

I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...

I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you can do radically better than the status quo.

[Tsagadai]

System on chip PCR machine? The lowest hanging fruit would be miniaturization and better engineering of existing diagnostic machines. At the moment the medical diagnostic market is filled with overly expensive devices that could be easily made cheaper and more efficient (somewhere with a favourable patent/legal regime so you don't get sued to oblivion).