Exact Sciences uses March Madness campaign to drive colon cancer screening

March means the NCAA Tour­na­ment in the sports world, and Ex­act Sci­ences is hop­ing to in­spire mid­dle-aged fans to get screened for colon can­cer.

Its “Box Out Colon Can­cer” ef­fort, in part­ner­ship with The Blue Hat Foun­da­tion, is led by for­mer NBA and Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky star Ja­mal Mash­burn, along with a hand­ful of col­lege coach­es in the 45 to 49 age group that Ex­act is try­ing to reach.

“We’re find­ing a lot of 45-year-olds don’t know it’s time for them to get screened,” Ex­act Sci­ences’ chief mar­ket­ing of­fi­cer Jaime La­M­on­tagne said. “We’re re­al­ly try­ing to reach out to dif­fer­ent races, gen­ders and eth­nic­i­ties be­cause, un­for­tu­nate­ly, the need is par­tic­u­lar­ly crit­i­cal for the African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty as they’re 20% more like­ly to de­vel­op colon can­cer and 40% more like­ly to die from it.”

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