3. Internal Technology Assessment
Literature Search Methods
CMS typically considers a category of tests or devices, rarely making decisions on brand specific items; however, since the Epi proColon® test is the only FDA-approved commercially available blood-based colorectal cancer screening test at the time of this review, we focused our review and included a specific search for evidence on this test. CMS staff searched PubMed for publications from the period of 1999 to January 2020. General keywords included the DNA biomarker for the screening test, "mSEPT9", and colorectal cancer. Publications that presented original data on screening with blood-based DNA testing were considered. Publications that had the terms "blood-based", "plasma", and "colorectal cancer" in the abstract were included. Keywords for the search included "blood based’, "mSEPT9", "SEPT9 DNA", "SEPT9", "Septin 9", "Septin9", "Septin 9 DNA", "Epi proColon®", and "colorectal cancer screening". CMS staff searched the bibliographies of relevant publications for other pertinent studies. Abstracts, meeting presentations, reviews, animal studies, microsimulation modeling studies, mechanistic studies, and non-English publications were excluded. Studies with fewer than 10 cases and those not involving human subjects were excluded. The reviewed evidence was gathered from articles submitted by the requester and from the public comments and the PubMed literature search.
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