A new study published in the journal Nature Communications claims a new blood test could be the “Holy Grail” of cancer diagnostics. But it’s not ready for your doctor’s office just yet.
Scientists from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia had a tricky problem to solve – different kinds of cancers manifest in different ways in the body. So their goal was to find one common thing to measure that would indicate the presence of any type of cancer cells.
According to co-author Dr. Abu Sina:
“Because cancer is an extremely complicated and variable disease, it has been difficult to find a simple signature common to all cancers, yet distinct from healthy cells.”
The scientists discovered that once cancer cells of any kind die, they release their contents into the blood. The DNA that spills from the cell turns out to have a predictable signature.
The genomes of cancer cells have clusters of something called methyl groups at very specific locations in the DNA. These can be measured and used to detect the presence of cancer.
“It is this global change in the methylation pattern, and overall levels and distribution that our methodology is able to detect in a simplified way…”
As it turns out, these methyl groups cause DNA to fold up into three-dimensional structures that are attracted to gold. So the test involves introducing gold nanoparticles to the blood sample. If the test is positive, the methyl structures will turn the nanoparticles a different color. Altogether, the test takes a mere 10 minutes.
Ideally, the test would be cheap and portable and the researchers hope that, eventually, it will become part of the standard round of blood tests people get at their annual check-ups, performed alongside things like cholesterol readings.
“This new discovery could be a game-changer in the field of point of care cancer diagnostics.”
So far, these cancer “methylscapes” (short for the for methylation landscapes that indicate that cancer cells are present) appear in all types of breast cancer, as well as prostate and bowel cancer, and blood cancer lymphoma. The test is about 90% accurate, but scientists are still refining it.
The other unique aspect of this new technology is that it requires minimal preparation of the samples to be tested, reducing time and cost.
“[I]t looks really interesting as an incredibly simple universal marker of cancer, and as a very accessible and inexpensive technology that does not require complicated lab-based equipment like DNA sequencing.”
But it’s not yet ready for prime time. In its current form, the test is only able to determine the presence of disease and more work will have to be done in order to refine it so that it can give patients and their doctors information about the type and stage of the cancer detected.
While we already use blood tests to help diagnose cancer, they are normally just one of a battery of tests required to confirm a diagnosis, and they vary based on the type of cancer one is looking for.
MRI scans are also used to detect tumors, but often miss small ones, so they’re generally used to confirm a diagnosis.
Around 9 out of every 10 cancer deaths occur because the diagnosis was made too late for treatment to be successful, so this new research could eventually save millions of lives a year.
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