New Cancer Blood Test 96% Accuracy

mike3121

See link below. I don't think tests require the long waiting and phase testing as a new drug. Hey wife's ER+ and metaplastic triple negative BC now NED after chemo and rads. What was thought a kidney cancer was benign. Most tumors on kidneys are 85% cancer. Dodged another bullet there.

http://news.yahoo.com/new-blood-test-can-detect-cancer-from-a-single-123449124.html

Englishmummy

Mike, great news on both counts for your wife. This gives me a little hope for my young children - developments ARE being made. Thanks for posting, wishing your lovely wife continued NED.

JohnSmith

The field of liquid biopsies for tracking disease progression and therapeutic response has really grown. Many doctors are looking for ways to apply this approach to their patients. Currently, assays for circulating tumor cells (CTCs) - one type of liquid biopsy - have been approved for diagnostic purposes in metastatic breast, colorectal, or prostate cancer. In these diseases, the presence of CTCs in the peripheral blood is associated with decreased progression-free survival and decreased overall survival. The major challenge for this technology is that CTCs are not always found in the blood of patients with aggressive disease who would be expected to have high numbers. For ex, researchers investigated a type of melanoma showing that the low numbers could simply be explained by where the blood is drawn - whether from a vein or an artery.

In breast cancer, a high number of CTCs (more than 5 cells in 7.5 ml of blood collected from the veins) indicates aggressive metastatic disease, or disease that has stopped responding to treatment. Although, some research raised a concern that venous blood specimens, which are tested as the standard practice for CTC measurement, might not be the best source for CTC detection.

Most commonly, blood samples are obtained from a patient's vein, which has already passed through an intricate network of narrow capillaries throughout the body before draining to the veins. When comparing blood samples taken from veins to that collected from arteries, researchers saw a much higher number of CTC's in blood collected from the arteries than in the veins. In fact, all melanoma patients with multiple liver metastasis had CTCs present in their arterial blood, while only 53 percent of blood sampled from the veins of those same patients had CTCs.

This shows that there is a long way to go to determine how to standardize these new liquid biopsies. Still, it's definitely the future.