Researchers have developed a new blood test that holds the potential of changing the way we detect cancer thereby phasing out the currently used biopsy method.
As most of you might know, currently to detect cancer, a piece of the tumor of patient is cut by the doctor. However, a new blood test being trialed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York will make biopsies unneeded in future as it relies on locating tiny snippets of cancer DNA in a patient’s blood.
The researchers are hopeful that this blood test will allow oncologists to immediately figure out regardless of whether a treatment is operating and, if so, to closely monitor the remedy if resistance is developed by cancer.
“This could transform forever the way we stick to up not only response to treatments but also the emergence of resistance, and down the line could even be employed for definitely early diagnosis,” said Dr. Jose Baselga, physician in chief and chief healthcare officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
The researchers, however, said that much more evaluations of the accuracy and reliability of the test should be done. They added that only compact studies have been done in unique cancers, which includes lung, colon and blood cancer. But early final results are without encouraging.
The findings of the study done by National Cancer Institute were published this month in The Lancet Oncology. For the study, the researchers involved 126 patients with the most frequent kind of lymphoma identified the test predicted recurrences a lot more than three months prior to they have been noticeable on CT scans. The liquid biopsies also identified individuals who are unlikely to show any response to therapy.
“Every cancer has a mutation that can be followed with this system,” said Dr. David Hyman, an oncologist at Sloan Kettering. “It is like bar coding the cancer in the blood.”
“I can not do a weekly liver biopsy and see how things are going,” Baselga stated. “But I can do a blood test just about every week.”
