In a major development, scientists
have devised a blood test that can detect eight of the most common types of
cancer. Hence, a team of scientists at John Hopkins University, who published
the study in journal Science, said the test could be available to patients in
the next couple of years. The test called CancerSEEK looks for the presence of
eight different types of cancer, including breast, lung and colorectal cancers,
ovarian, liver, stomach, pancreatic and esophageal which are commonly diagnosed
when it is too late to battle them and are together accountable for more than
60 percent of cancer deaths in the United States. There have been numerous
attempts more than two decades to develop blood tests to screen for cancers.
Some look for proteins in the blood that appear with cancer. Others more
recently have focused on DNA from tumors. But these methods alone don't give
reliable results.
So, for the first time we are
seeing a possible for a blood test that can screen for many types of nasty
cancers that until now we have had to wait until symptoms are diagnosed quite
late. CancerSeek looks for traces of mutated DNA and proteins released by
tumors in the bloodstream explicitly mutations in 16 genes and eight proteins. However,
working with blood samples of 1,005 people with one of the eight different
cancer types, researchers used CancerSEEK to dependably recognize the tumors in
70 percent cases. ," said Professor Peter Gibbs from the Walter and Eliza
Hall Institute, who was one of the researchers involved in the study.
Moreover, the success rates
ranged from an inspiring 98 percent in case of ovarian tumors to only 33
percent in people with breast tumors. This field of early detection is very critical,
and the results are very exciting," Dr Cristian Tomasetti from Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine told the BBC. I think this can have a huge
impact on cancer mortality, thus apart from the ease of a blood test; another
factor going for CancerSeek is the cost of the testing. As for the cost of the
test, the research team has tried hard to make it affordable. The projected
price tag of $500 for the test is less than for those of other screening
methods. Professor Gibbs said with the progress of the technology and with more
people partaking of the test, they expected the cost to come down over time. So
expectantly, sooner or later this will be a few hundred dollars, which puts it
in the ballpark of numerous other tests that we routinely do.
Joshua Cohen, the lead author of
the study, said, our eventual vision is that a person goes to their primary caution
provider for a routine checkup and at the same time as testing their
cholesterol, they have a screening to test for different types of cancer.
Though, the researchers stressed the need for a larger-scale trial before
making CancerSEEK available commercially. Therefore, with this in mind, they
are get on on a new study featuring 10,000 healthy individuals, eager it will
allow them to further ascertain if the test can accurately predict who
ultimately develops cancer. The potential study will answer the question, can
this test detect cancer earlier than conventional methods, and at the same time
as this, we will be working on improving and refining CancerSEEK," said
Cohen. 
