This TED Talk features cancer fighter Joshua Smith, recorded live at TED at IBM, 2016.

You have cancer.

Sadly, about 40% of us will hear those three words within our lifetime, and half will not survive.

This means that two out of five of your closest friends and relatives will be diagnosed with some form of cancer, and one will die. Beyond the physical hardships, roughly one-third of cancer survivors here in the U.S.

will go into debt from treatment, and they're at least two and a half times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without cancer.

This disease is pervasive. It's emotionally draining and for many,

financially destructive. But a cancer diagnosis doesn't have to be a death sentence. Finding cancer

early, closer to its genesis is one of the critical factors to improving treatment options,

reducing its emotional impact, and minimizing financial burdens.

Most importantly, finding cancer early, which is one of the primary aims of my research,

greatly enhances your odds of survival.

If we just look at the case of breast cancer, for example,

we find that those who are diagnosed and treated at stage one

have a five-year survival rate of nearly 100 percent,

odds that decrease to just 22 percent if treated at stage four.

And similar trends are found for colorectal and ovarian cancer.

Now, we're all aware that an early diagnosis that is accurate is critical for survival.

The problem is that many cancer diagnostic tools are invasive, costly, often inaccurate,

and they can take an agonizing amount of time to get the results back.

Still worse, when it comes to some forms of cancer, such as ovarian, liver, or pancreatic cancer,

good screening methods simply don't exist,

meaning that often people wait until physical symptoms surface, which are themselves already indicators of late stage progression.

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