Scientists hail huge breakthrough in blood test for cancer

While far more research needs to be done to develop such a blood test to detect early-stage cancers in the general population, the new study provides an additional piece to that puzzle, said Widschwendter.

“We selected those eight cancers based on how frequent they are, also [because] a lot of them do not have any screening modality right now”, study author Nickolas Papadopoulos, a professor of oncology and pathology at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, told NPR.

The non-invasive test, called CancerSEEK, simultaneously looks for the presence of ovary, liver, stomach, pancreas, oesophagus, bowel, lung and breast cancer, diagnosing tumours before they have spread.

The test, which was created by the John Hopkins Cancer Centre, is called CancerSEEK.

Scientists are “very close” to using blood tests to screen for cancer as they “have the technology”. Another issue with liquid biopsies is the ability to identify the underlying tissue of origin.

The Cancer Seek test looks for mutations in 16 genes that regularly arise in cancer and eight proteins that are often released.

Cohen is a student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the first author of the paper describing the CancerSEEK test, which appeared in the January 19, 2018, issue of Science.

It offers particular hope in pancreatic cancer, which can go undetected for 20 to 30 years. Being able to detect cancer from a vial of blood would change the game entirely. The result was a “small but robust” panel of highly selective DNA markers. Only seven of 812, or less than 1%, of healthy controls tested positive. The CancerSEEK achieved 70% accuracy. Early stage cancers shed fewer markers.

The percentage of successful tests varied for different types of cancer, ranging from 98 percent in people with ovarian tumors, to 33 percent in people with tumors of the breast.

With cancer risks rising from the age of 50, he said, the test would be most important to older people, but also for younger people whose family histories might put them in a high-risk category.

In addition, CancerSEEK appeared to be more effective at detecting cancer in later stages rather than earlier stages.

Research funded by a Long Island organization has come up with a test that promises to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages. The team developed a supervised machine learning approach to predict the underlying cancer type in patients with positive test results.

Some described the test as novel because it hunts for both the mutated DNA and the proteins.

In particular, the analysts assessed levels of eight proteins and the nearness of transformations in 2,001 genomic positions to identify indications of tumor.

“I’m enormously excited. This is the Holy Grail – a blood test to diagnose cancer without all the other procedures like scans or colonoscopy”. “Will this eventually impact patients’ care?” “If we’re able to pick it up early, then we can significantly improve the chances of curing patients”.