New Test Can Help Detect Cancer Four Years Before Symptoms Arise
It is now well-known that if cancer is
detected early, it may help save the lives of millions who suffer from
this disease. In fact, doctors everywhere stress the fact that early
cancer detection may certainly increase the patient’s chances of
survival. Hence, the latest development on this front is always
extremely encouraging. An international team of scientists has developed
a blood test that can help detect five common types of cancer four
years before symptoms appear.
Called PanSeer, the test can detect cancers
of the stomach, as well as esophageal, colorectal, lung, and liver
cancers. The most crucial part of the test is that it can spot the
disease up to four years before conventional diagnosis methods, like
imaging tests or biopsies.
The findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications,
could be a significant and revolutionary breakthrough and could help
identify those at high risk of developing cancer.
“The ultimate goal would be performing blood tests like this routinely
during annual health checkups,” said Kun Zhang, one of the paper’s
corresponding authors and professor and chair of the Department of
Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego. “But the
immediate focus is to test people at higher risk, based on family
history, age, or other known risk factors.”
A non-invasive blood-test system
The authors analyzed plasma samples from 605 individuals who did not
show any symptoms of the disease. 191 of these people were later
diagnosed with cancer. The team then also profiled plasma samples from
223 diagnosed cancer patients along with 200 primary tumor and normal
tissue samples.
The experimental blood test developed by the team has been able to
detect cancer in a whopping 95 percent of the participants who were
asymptomatic when the samples were collected. However, they were only
diagnosed with the disease later. Furthermore, the test also accurately
detected cancer in 88 percent of the samples from 113 patients who were
already diagnosed with five common types of the disease.
This is quite extraordinary, indeed. "What we showed is: up to four
years before these people walk into the hospital, there are already
signatures in their blood that show they have cancer,” added Zhang.
The samples have been collected as part of a 10-year longitudinal study
launched in 2007 by Fudan University in China. The technique of this
unique test comprises of detecting the revealing cancer signs based on
very small levels of tumor DNA circulating in the blood. According to
the researchers, these tests show that cancer can be non-invasively
detected up to four years before the present standard of care.
How successful this test, which is still in its experimental phases,
goes on to become will be known in a few years.