Could a Simple Blood Test Detect 'Solid' Cancers?

Detecting certain types of cancers may not always be so easy. Often times, pinpointing the exact type and location of tumors or determining the advancement of the disease can be extremely difficult.

Yet according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, there may be a more applicable approach to detecting highly sensitive and specific types that could potentially identify 50 percent of patients' stage-1 lung cancer cells and even those with more advanced kinds.

"We set out to develop a method that overcomes two major hurdles in the circulating tumour DNA field," said Maximilian Diehn, assistant professor of radiation oncology, via a press release. "First, the technique needs to be very sensitive to detect the very small amounts of the tumour DNA present in the blood.

"Second, to be clinically useful it's necessary to have a test that works off the shelf for the majority of patients with a given cancer."

As tumors are called 'solid' or 'liquid' based depending on where they grow in the body, this new technique called CAPP-Seq (cancer personalized profiling by deep sequencing) is sensitive enough to detect just one molecule of tumor DNA in a sea of 10,000 healthy DNA molecules found in the blood, according to the release. 

Diehn notes that the problem with detecting certaint types of cancers has been that there's a very small amount of DNA located in the cancer cells. This can make detection particularly difficult, according to NPR.

Fortunately, this new technology has allowed him and other researchers to discover tiny amounts of DNA and scan large parts of it to determine if mutations from tumors are present.

"The initial impetus was having something I could use in my own patients ... as a blood test that would let us both detect the presence of cancer as well as monitor how a patient's cancer responds to various treatments," he added, via the release.

As it stands, the new experimental test is specifically targeted to non-small-cell lung cancers. However, scientists are not only working to improve lung-cancer tests, but they're also crafting the background for tests to help detect lymphomas, cancers of the breast, esophagus and pancreas, as well.

More information regarding the findings can be seen in the journal Nature Medicine.