Simple Blood Test Could Detect Cancer Early | WPN World People News

Detecting many forms of cancer may soon be as easy as a simple blood test, according to a new study.

The blood test could also be used to “monitor the amount of cancer in a patient’s body, as well as measure their response to various treatments.

The test, called CAPP-Seq, for Cancer Personalized Profiling by deep Sequencing, is a refinement of past approaches to measuring the level of tumor DNA in the patient’s bloodstream, according to the study.

The new method was able to accurately identify about 50 percent of people in the study with stage-1 lung cancer and all patients whose cancers were more advanced.

Researchers said that cancer cells “are continuously dividing and dying,” and as they do, they release DNA into the bloodstream. They called these traces of DNA “tiny messages in a bottle.”

Reading these messages can allow better diagnoses and better monitoring of treatment. This blood test would go far toward finding the one mutation in 1,000 or 10,000 that come from cancer cells.

The vast majority of circulating DNA is from normal, non-cancerous cells, even in patients with advanced cancer. We needed a comprehensive strategy for isolating the circulating DNA from blood and detecting the rare, cancer-associated mutations.

It’s an important advance in the field. The goal is to detect very small, early stage tumors.

One of the major breakthroughs of the test is the ability to monitor changes in DNA mutations in cancer patients who are already receiving treatment and may develop a resistance to a specific medicine.

The test was very unlikely to produce false positives because cancer “DNA mutations are unlikely to be found in healthy people.

In the future, the researchers said the test could be used to “screen healthy or at-risk populations for signs of trouble.”

It may be possible to develop assays that could simultaneously screen for multiple cancers. This would include diseases such as breast, prostate, colorectal and lung cancer, for example.

While the breakthrough was promising, it’s likely going to be five or 10 years before a screening test would be available to the general public.

Source: Voice of America