Blood test could spot lung cancer early

Washington, June 4: A blood test has offered hope of finding cancers before symptoms develop.

The test that analyses free- floating DNA in blood may be able to detect earlystage lung cancer, a preliminary report from the ongoing Circulating CellFree Genome Atlas ( CCGA) study suggests.

The findings are from one of the first studies to explore whether sequencing blood- borne DNA is a feasible approach to early cancer detection.

“We’re excited that the initial results from the CCGA study show it is possible to detect early- stage lung cancer from blood samples using genome sequencing,” said the study’s lead author, Geoffrey R. Oxnard.

“There is an unmet need globally for early- detection tests for lung cancer that can be easily implemented by health- care systems. These are promising early results and the next steps are to further optimise the assays and validate the results in a larger group of people,” he added.

Early diagnosis is essential to improve survival rates for lung cancer. A blood test that could be done through a simple blood draw at the doctor's office could potentially have a major impact on survival, but before such a test could be widely used, additional validation in larger data sets and in studies involving people who have not been diagnosed with cancer would be needed, researchers say.

Tests that analyse cellfree DNA in blood, known

as “liquid biopsies”, are already used to help choose targeted therapies for people already diagnosed with lung cancer. Until recently, there has been limited evidence to indicate that cell- free DNA analysis may be feasible for early detection of the disease.

The CCGA study has enrolled more than 12,000 of the planned 15,000 participants ( 70 percent with cancer, 30 percent without cancer) across 141 sites in the United States and Canada.

The new report is from the first sub- study from the CCGA, in which three prototype sequencing assays were performed on blood samples from approximately 1,700 participants. In this initial analysis, researchers explored the ability of the three assays to detect cancer in 127 people with stage I- IV lung cancer. The assays were designed to detect cancerdefining signals ( mutations and other genomic changes) that could be used in an early cancer detection test.