Stanford University scientists have developed a new, highly sensitive blood test that may help detect cancer tumors in the near future.
In a new study of the test, published in Nature Medicine, the approach correctly identified half of patients with early stages of lung cancer and all patients in later, more life-threatening stages.
The researchers said the blood test holds promise for diagnosing a variety of cancers at a fraction of the cost of current diagnostic methods.
"Blood cancers like leukemias can be easier to monitor than solid tumors through ease of access to the blood," said Ash Alizadeh, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, who helped conduct the research. "By developing a general method for monitoring circulating tumor DNA, we're in effect trying to transform solid tumors into liquid tumors that can be detected and tracked more easily."
The new approach — called CAPP-Seq (which is short for Cancer Personalized Profiling by deep Sequencing) — is sensitive enough to detect one molecule of tumor DNA among 10,000 DNA molecules from healthy cells in the blood, the researchers said.
They added that while they hope the test one day will be used to track the progress of tumors in patients already diagnosed with cancer, it also has potential as a cancer screening tool for healthy and at-risk people.
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