Down 40% in 2022, Can Exact Sciences Recover in 2023?

Early cancer detection is a lot more common these days than it was a decade ago. Exact Sciences (NASDAQ: EXAS) can't claim all the credit, but the non-invasive cancer tests

that it markets play an important role. The company's cancer tests screened around 4 million people in 2021. Despite a big audience for its products, shares of Exact

Sciences fell about 40% last year, and they are still down about 56% from their peak in early 2021. Is this beaten-down growth stock a bargain now, or is it still too risky for

most investors? Here's what you should know. Reasons to buy Exact Sciences stock Exact Sciences made its mark with Cologuard, a non-invasive colon cancer screen. It's

steadily funneled Cologuard revenue into innovative new modes of cancer detection that include a multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test for the broad public. Success in the

highly coveted MCED arena could drive this stock through the roof, and Exact Sciences is making progress. Last September, a blood-based test set that examined 1,132 samples

for four different signs of a malignancy flagged 61% of samples known to have cancer. This isn't incredibly sensitive, but the lack of false positives is encouraging. Exact

Sciences also recorded a 98.2% specificity rate, which means nearly all of the samples it flagged actually came from people known to have cancer. Exact Sciences' flagship

test, Cologuard, could soon get an upgrade, called Cologuard 2.0. In early 2022, the company ran samples from the Deep-C trial that led to Cologuard's initial approval using

Cologuard 2.0, and the results were highly encouraging.