Blood test may detect early lung cancer – study
A test that analyses free-floating DNA in the blood may be able to detect early-stage lung cancer, a preliminary report from the ongoing Circulating Cell-Free Genome Atlas (CCGA) study suggests.
The findings, from one of the first studies to explore whether sequencing blood-borne DNA is a feasible approach to the early cancer detection, were featured at the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
“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 lead study author Geoffrey R Oxnard, MD, of Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “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 optimize the assays and validate the results in a larger group of people.”
Early diagnosis is key to improving 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 cell-free 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% with cancer, 30% without cancer) across 141 sites in the US 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. Twenty different cancer types of all stages were included in the sub-study (additional early results from the sub-study, including breast, gastrointestinal, gynaecologic, blood and other cancers will be presented separately at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting).
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