This is a cancer that is typically detected only after it advances far enough that you will be dead in 6 months (not treatment possible). If we could detect it 2 years sooner it would be treatable and most people could life for many more years. Sure the total cost of a positive will be much higher - between whatever tests to verify it isn't a false positive, and all the treatment it will be a lot more money. However by spending that money many people will live a lot longer.
Maybe you don't like any old people, but I often wish I could show my dad my latest project. This test could have saved his life if we had it 15 years ago.
We could spend more money on road safety (or say, reduce the speed limit to 10 mph) but we don't because the costs are too high.
Now, given the relatively common but almost universally fatal nature of pancreatic cancer, any sort of moderately effective screening is probably worth doing, but the argument that if we don't then some people will die isn't very strong.
It might still be useful to know you have weird protease activity that isn’t cancer derived, but the more of these tests we do, the more likely it is that for every person, there’ll be at least one non-cancer oddity that looks like cancer signal for at least some test.
I thought that's how HIV rapid testing works.
Although it is the opposite of what the doctors want, I would prefer a less sensitive but highly specific test.
If I had 80% sensitivity I'd miss out on 20% of cancers, but if I could match that with a 99.9% specificity I'd have very few false positives.
I hope this type of test can tune that direction.