Blood Test for Lung Cancer in the Works

[steven johnson]

SomaLogic in Boulder, Colorado is developing SomaDx, a lung cancer blood test under development that relies on a signature of 12 proteins. They claim it can correctly identify lung cancer more than 90% of the time and at a much earlier stage than the usual tests. They feel that this can allow diagnosis of single nodules in the lung without invasive biopsies.

A blood test under study to help diagnose lung cancer looks promising, researchers reported Tuesday at a cancer meeting in California.

If perfected, the test could help spare patients the need to undergo invasive procedures such as biopsies when lung cancer is suspected, they predict.

''Currently, 20% to 25% of surgeries done for suspected lung cancer turn out to be benign diagnoses," says Steven Dubinett, MD, professor of medicine and pathology and director of the Lung Cancer Research Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the senior author on the study, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research-International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's joint conference in Coronado, Calif

They found that 33 of the 40 biomarkers were different between the lung cancer patients and those not diagnosed with lung cancer. They found that the panel of biomarkers was accurate in identifying lung cancer patients 88% of the time. It also correctly identified patients who did not have lung cancer 79% of the time

Blood Test for Lung Cancer in the Works

[applegrove]

1. Excellent! I am quit smoking but was a smoker for 27 years. I welcome this news.

[Bitwit1234]

2. I can't understand why that hasn't been done

25 years ago I had a cancerous tumor attached to the ovaries. No ovarian cancer. After a successful operation and it hadn't metastasized, each year they had a blood test that I took for ten years to check for tumors. I asked the nurse when I was given the test why it couldn't find all tumors, she said that it was unique to those I had. But I always thought if they could do it for one why not all. Thank goodness the have this. Breast cancer should be next. I am recovering from two operations for breast cancer and am hoping I don't have to take a long bout of chemo. At least they caught it before it had really started to spread much further.