Jim Davis

And really only a third of our business is prevention and wellness, general health and wellness testing.

Honestly, I hope over the next decade we can flip that.

I really hope that we can be two-thirds prevention and wellness and then a third chronic care management.

Yeah, Alzheimer's, Katie, is a very, very important set of tests that we now offer.

You know, before blood-based biomarkers came to fruition with respect to Alzheimer's, really the gold standard were cognitive tests that physicians perform, and then they would move that patient directly into imaging, whether that's a PET-CT image or an MRI image.

And today what we're seeing is there's blood-based biomarkers for amyloid plaque for what we call these tau bundles.

And you're actually going to detect Alzheimer's at a much earlier stage than what you would see in imaging.

And some of the new therapies that have been brought to market by Esai and by Lilly, these therapies generally work really, really well at the earliest stages of disease onset.

So these biomarkers are playing a very, very important role today.

We position these blood-based tests with primary care physicians as well as neurologists.

You know, today, if you have symptoms of Alzheimer's, it can take upwards of six to eight months to get in to see a memory care specialist.

And patients just don't want to wait that long because again, there's therapies available if you are diagnosed.

Yeah, first, Katie, it's a very, very important part of our business today.

Most people don't know, but Quest Diagnostics has a very large anatomical pathology business.

Anatomical pathology is when specimens are cut outside, cut from the human body, they're tissue samples.

And so we have a very, we have the largest anatomical pathology business in the country where we make diagnoses of cancer every single day.

Now, once you have that tumor specimen, there's several follow-on tests that are very important.

The first being, what type of therapy should be used to treat that cancer?

After treatment or potentially right after surgery, the next question is, did the surgeon get it all or did the chemotherapy eradicate that disease?

And we have a test.