Posted on 03/25/2017 3:07:35 AM PDT by tired&retired
A blood test which not only detects cancer but identifies where it is in the body, has been developed by scientists.
The breakthrough could allow doctors to diagnose specific cancers much earlier, even before signs such as a lump, begin to show.
It is simple enough to be included in routine annual health checks alongside other tests such as for high blood pressure or cholesterol.
The test, called CancerLocator, has been developed by the University of California, and works by hunting for the DNA from tumours which circulates in the blood of cancer patients.
The team discovered that tumours which arise in different parts of the body hold a distinctive ‘footprint’ which a computer can spot.
“Non-invasive diagnosis of cancer is important, as it allows the early diagnosis of cancer, and the earlier the cancer is caught, the higher chance a patient has of beating the disease,” said Professor Jasmine Zhou, co-lead author from the University of California at Los Angeles.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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January 11, 2016
Unique cancer mutations show up in microscopic fragments of DNA in a patient’s blood, which can give physicians a telltale sign of the presence of the disease in almost all types of cancer mutations — within cells or floating freely in the bloodstream.
The “liquid biopsies,” as the tests are known, have become something of a Holy Grail in cancer treatment among physicians, researchers and companies betting big on the technology.
Liquid biopsies — unlike traditional biopsies involving invasive surgery — rely on an ordinary blood draw. Advances in sequencing the human genome, enabling researchers to detect genetic mutations of cancers, have made the tests possible.
As recently as a few years ago, the liquid biopsies were rarely used except in research. Today, thousands of the tests are being used in clinical practices in the United States and abroad, including at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston; the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, San Francisco; the Duke Cancer Institute and numerous other cancer centers.
Researchers at Hopkins and 23 other cancer centers did a survey in 2014 of liquid biopsies in 846 patients with 15 different types of cancer, and the tests revealed cancers in the blood of 80 percent of those with advanced cancers, but only 47 percent of those with localized disease.
“The results showed that in early-stage cancer, we still have some work to do,” Velculescu said. “In those cases, repeating liquid biopsies may be needed.”
The liquid biopsies also appear to work better in some cancers than others. The tests, for instance, appear to be less effective in detecting brain cancers, partly due to the blood-brain barrier, a natural defense system that regulates the passages of substances between blood and the brain.
The liquid biopsy shows real promise: An NCI study published in April in “The Lancet Oncology” involving 126 patients with the most common form of lymphoma showed the test predicted recurrences more than three months before they turned up in CT scans.
Maybe I’m just too jaded, but every time I see headlines like this the turtle-necked visage of that loony Elizabeth Holmes comes swooping into mind.
Funny... I thought the same thing and looked it up before posting.
This is legitimate. I had dinner with one of the researchers a few months ago and was very surprised at how far they have come with this research. It’s being done at reputable universities.
It appears that Elizabeth Holmes was just a huckster using cutting edge technology before it was ready by fabricating the results.
I would be curious about a scientific explanation of this, not the over-simplified version that is released to the public.
I’m thinking that early cancer is localized, so there really would be nothing to detect elsewhere in the body or in the blood. But a cancer that has begun to metastasize would be shedding cells, and some of them could make it into the blood.
I’m guessing that the DNA markers they are looking for are epigenetic alterations, not changes in the sequence. It could be both, I suppose.
Anyway, I can’t really comment on how likely this is to really work or on how many cancers it would detect, because the article gives so little solid information.
My concern with this is that they’ll discover that everybody has cancer. We probably all do, but our immune system keeps it in check for most of us. What if the end result is millions start getting painful treatments for cancers with nasty side effects, and most of those cancers were never going to be harmful in the first place?
If your using the test to detect early cancer then there would be no metastatic disease. The test would tell you the type of tissue the cancer is located in: Lung, Liver, Intestine. It would not give you an exact (x,y,z) coordinate/
If you use the test in metastatic cancer it would tell you what tissue the primary tumor came from.
That's one of the details I would like to know more about. If there is no metastatic disease, then how is there detectable DNA from cancer cells in the blood?
There would be a tumor somewhere in the body that is not causing any systemic effects like pain or organ dysfunction. So you wouldn't be going to the doctor because you had a problem, you would be going for routine check up and get the lab done. The cells are cancer cells in the early stages hopefully before they have the ability to metastasize.
Cancer cells when they first appear are from a cell or cells that have changed to cancer cells. They were a kidney, liver, lung ... (pick your organ of choice) and now they're cancerous. It takes time to go from a cancer to a metastatic cancer. First they form a primary tumor then over time they breed in the ability to come apart, invade local tissue and slip into the blood stream or lymph system. Over time again the cells that have slipped away have to land in a new spot and take root to form a metastatic tumor.
The idea behind the test is that the cancer cells are putting out DNA sequences that say I'm a cancer and I'm this kind of tissue. So if I routinely test I should be able to tell you when you first get a cancer before it has become metastatic. By being able to tell what the tissue type is we can focus an MRI on that part of the body and pinpoint where the cancer is. This could mean we could surgically remove it at a point in its development that the surgery would be a full cure (like doing a colonoscopy and removing a polyp before it becomes cancerous).
That's like those PSA blood tests for prostate cancer. It was so accurate that it could detect minute traces. The medical profession had to come out and warn against over-reaction if PSA detected it, as most prostate enlargements were benign. They suggest that if detected, monitor it closely but don't go off the rails and go the surgery route, which among other downsides, would prevent erection or cause incontinence.
Where we’re at with healthcare here, it will only be available for the elite.
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