BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) has announced a strategic partnership with Camtech Health, a digital health company focused on at-home health testing, to advance cervical cancer screening by offering the first-ever option for women in Singapore to self-collect a sample in the privacy of their own home.

The programme combines the Camtech Health HPV (human papillomavirus) test for self-collection with the BD Onclarity HPV Assay, which is a clinically validated test that can simultaneously detect 14 high-risk HPV strains (or genotypes). The programme objective is to improve the rate of cervical cancer screening in Singapore, where less than half of eligible women are currently being tested.

Combining HPV self-collection with an assay that individually identified more kinds of HPV allows clinicians to focus on those women at highest risk while not overtreating those at very low risk by allowing risk stratification directly on the screening sample. The BD Onclarity HPV Assay received the industry's first CE Mark for HPV screening from at-home self-collected vaginal samples.

BD Onclarity is the only US FDA-approved assay that tests for an extended set of HPV types individually, and particularly for HPV52 and HPV33/58, three HPV types that pose a high-risk for causing cervical cancer in Singapore.