Holy grail blood test for cancer
Eight forms of disease detected by jab
A BLOOD test than can detect eight kinds of cancer has been described as “enormously exciting” by medics.
It could save thousands of lives by spotting diseases in their early stages.
It raises the prospect of a single annual jab to detect all cancers before any symptoms.
Study leader Dr Gert Attard said: “This is the Holy Grail - a blood test to diagnose cancer without all the other procedures like scans or colonoscopy.”
More than 1,000 patients with cancers of the ovary, liver, stomach, pancreas, oesophagus, colorectum, lung or breast took the CancerSEEK test on a trial.
Its ability to find cancers was successful 70% of the time - and ranged from a high of 98% for ovarian cancer to 33% for breast cancer. Dr Gert Attard, of the Institute of Cancer Research, London, told the BBC: “This is of massive potential. I’m enormously excited. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the US developed the CancerSEEK test, which looks for mutations in 16 genes and evaluates the levels of eight proteins usually released by cancer sufferers. But Dr Richard Marais, of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, urged caution. He said: “This study only looked at people who were diagnosed with cancer. “We don’t yet know how effective it would be at picking up the disease in people who don’t have symptoms.” Brushing your teeth regularly protects against cancers caused by bugs in the mouth, says Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US.