ClearNote Health’s enhanced Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test delivers industry-leading early detection performance
Proprietary multianalyte and multiomic assay with optimized machine learning capabilities achieve significantly higher 82% sensitivity and 97% specificity in high-risk populations
25 Feb 2026
ClearNote Health has launched its enhanced Avantect® Pancreatic Cancer Test, which delivers significantly improved detection for patients at elevated risk of this disease. With a higher overall cancer detection sensitivity of 82.6% and specificity of 97.5%, the updated test empowers clinicians to identify signals of early-stage pancreatic cancer sooner, enabling more informed and timely clinical management decisions1.
As pancreatic cancer often goes undiagnosed until it has reached an advanced stage, many patients face limited treatment options and a grim prognosis. Until now, conventional non-invasive diagnostic approaches have lacked the sensitivity and specificity required to reliably identify pancreatic cancer in its earlier stages, when patients have a better chance of survival.
The enhanced Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test addresses this critical gap through an integrated, multianalyte and multiomic approach that relies on epigenomic 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) patterns, genomic and genotyping information from cfDNA, and a glycan biomarker, combined with optimized machine learning algorithms. This approach has improved early-stage (I–II) sensitivity to more than 76%1.
The enhanced test performance and user-friendly patient report allow clinicians to gain earlier insight into the likelihood of pancreatic cancer, offering additional context to inform clinical judgment alongside other diagnostic tools and clinical information.
Designed as a simple blood-based test, the Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test is intended for patients at elevated risk of the disease, including those with known genetic predispositions, a family history of pancreatic cancer, or those age 50 or older who have been newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
By evaluating multiple cancer-associated signals together, ClearNote Health’s approach provides meaningful context for care discussions. The updated test will be used for the Surveillance of pAncreatic health aFter diabEtes Diagnosis (SAFE-D) study led by the NHS in the UK — one of the world’s largest projects evaluating pancreatic cancer detection in individuals with new-onset diabetes.
The test is being incorporated into the international Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection (PRECEDE) Consortium, a global multi-center effort focused on advancing earlier diagnosis and risk-stratified screening for people with familial or genetic risk for pancreatic cancer.
The Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test is currently available as a laboratory-developed test for people at high risk in the United States through ClearNote Health’s CAP/CLIA-certified laboratory, which is qualified to perform high-complexity clinical testing, and for patients outside the U.S. through ClearNote Health’s international laboratory partnership network spanning 70 countries.
“The biggest challenge in pancreatic cancer care is detecting the disease early enough to meaningfully alter a patient’s outcome,” said Randall Brand, M.D., director of the UPMC GI Malignancy Early Detection, Diagnosis and Prevention Program and professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The ability to discover critical information through a blood-based test has the potential to transform precision oncology care in pancreatic cancer through early detection.”
The Avantect Pancreatic Cancer Test has not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
References
1. Data on file.