By Dennis Thompson 
 
 HealthDay Reporter 
 
 (HealthDay) 
 
 WEDNESDAY, Aug. 16, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- A new genetic blood test might pave the way for detecting early stage cancers that often prove fatal when caught too late, a new study suggests. 
 
 The test scans blood for DNA fragments released by cancerous tumors, explained lead researcher Dr. Victor Velculescu. 
 
 By reviewing these DNA fragments for mutations found in 58 "cancer-driver" genes, the blood test detects many early stage cancers without rendering false positives for healthy people, said Velculescu, co-director of cancer biology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, in Baltimore. 
 
 The test detected stage 1 or 2 colon, breast, lung or ovarian cancers between 59 percent and 71 percent of the time when assessing 200 patients previously diagnosed with cancer, researchers found. 
 
 "If we are able to detect cancer earlier, our chances of saving lives would be much higher," Velculescu said. "The survival difference between late-stage and early stage disease in these cancers accounts for over a million lives worldwide each year." 
 
 The test also proved capable of screening out cancer-free people. 
 
 Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, called this "important research" that "moves us one step further down the path to developing a blood test that might find cancer earlier." 
 
 "We still need to improve the sensitivity, but this is a step forward. It is a proof of concept," Lichtenfeld said. "It is not a test that's going to be available in a clinical laboratory anytime soon." 
 
 To develop a genetic blood test for cancer, researchers must find ways to spot DNA mutations linked to cancer while ignoring natural and harmless mutations that regularly occur in humans, Velculescu explained. 
 
 Velculescu and his team developed a genetic scan that essentially "takes a fragment here and a fragment there and uses it to create a picture of what the tumor DNA looks like," Lichtenfeld said. "That's what makes it so elegant." 
 
 The research team assembled a panel of 58 cancer-linked genes, and used their scan to look for tumor DNA fragments in the blood of 200 people known to have cancer. 
 
 Overall, researchers detected about 62 percent of stage 1 and 2 cancers. 
 
 The test specifically spotted early stage colon cancer 71 percent of the time, breast and lung cancer 59 percent of the time, and ovarian cancer 68 percent of the time. 
 
 The ability to catch early stage ovarian cancer is particularly needed, Lichtenfeld said. Fewer than one in five ovarian cancers are caught early, when the five-year survival rate is greater than 90 percent. Most are detected after they've spread, and by then the odds of five-year survival are 40 percent or less, he said. 
 
 "Finding any marker in a stage 1 ovarian cancer patient is very important, because this is a tumor that usually presents at a much later stage," Lichtenfeld said. 
 
 The researchers also directly tested cancerous tissue removed from half of the 200 cancer patients. They found that 82 percent of the tumors contained mutations that correlated with DNA fragments found in the person's blood. 
 
 To check the blood test's ability to weed out healthy people, the researchers also analyzed blood from 44 volunteers without cancer. No false positives occurred. 
 
 That equates to less than one false positive for more than 3.5 million letters of DNA sequenced, since each separate test requires assessment of 80,000 DNA base pairs associated with the 58-gene screening panel, Velculescu said. 
 
 Despite these promising results, researchers need to validate the blood test in larger studies, Velculescu said. 
 
 More work also needs to be done to improve the detection rate, Lichtenfeld added. "These tests were not able to detect 100 percent of the cancers," he said. 
 
 Finally, cancer doctors must discuss what will be done when technology evolves to the point that such tests regularly find tumors that aren't life-threatening, Lichtenfeld said. In some cases, treatment to remove the cancer could be worse than leaving it alone. 
 
 "What's going to be so important is to be able to distinguish cancers that will hurt people versus cancers that may not have long-term impact on survival," Lichtenfeld said. 
 
 The report appears in the Aug. 16 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine. 
 
 More information 
 
 For more on the genetics of cancer, visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute. ||||| CHICAGO (Reuters) - A test that scans blood for tumor-specific DNA identified early-stage cancer in more than half of 138 patients with the disease, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday, marking a new milestone in the rush for so-called “liquid biopsies.” 
 
 Several companies already offer tests that can detect cancer DNA in the blood of patients with late-stage cancers. Such tests are used to help guide treatment or identify whether cancers have returned after surgery. 
 
 Researchers behind the early-stage test hope it could be used to identify cancers at a stage when patients have a better chance at survival. 
 
 “To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies that has looked directly at early-stage cancers,” said Dr Victor Velculescu, professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, whose study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. 
 
 In making the test, the challenge was to identify rare DNA from real cancers while ignoring other types of genetic alterations that can occur as blood cells divide or genetic alterations that people are born with. 
 
 For the study, the team screened blood samples from patients with breast, lung, ovarian and colorectal cancers, looking for 58 genes typically linked with these cancers. Overall, they were able to detect 86 out of 138 stage I and stage II cancers. They also sequenced mutations in tumors from 100 of the patients studied, and found that in 82 patients, the same mutations found in the blood corresponded with those found in the tumor tissue. 
 
 They also tried the test on 44 healthy patients, and showed it did not detect any cancer-derived mutations. 
 
 Velculescu said more studies would be needed in much larger populations to prove the test can safely and accurately identify early-stage cancers, a process that could take up to five years. 
 
 The hope, he said, is that it would identify cancers at a stage when patients have a better chance at survival. First uses of the technology would be in patients at high risk for developing cancer, such as heavy smokers, he said. 
 
 In addition to being a researcher at Johns Hopkins, Velculescu is a co-founder of Personal Genome Diagnostics, a private liquid biopsy company. The study was done by Johns Hopkins researchers, he said. 
 
 In June, Grail, a spinoff from gene sequencer maker Illumina, presented a feasibility study for its liquid biopsy test at American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. In that study, researchers analyzed tissue and blood from patients with advanced cancers. Grail is also pursuing early-stage cancer detection. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Cancer blood test shows promise but more research is needed, says Prof Richard Marais 
 
 Scientists have taken a step towards one of the biggest goals in medicine - a universal blood test for cancer. 
 
 A team at Johns Hopkins University has trialled a method that detects eight common forms of the disease. 
 
 Their vision is an annual test designed to catch cancer early and save lives. UK experts said it was "enormously exciting". 
 
 However, one said more work was needed to assess the test's effectiveness at detecting early-stage cancers. 
 
 Tumours release tiny traces of their mutated DNA and proteins they make into the bloodstream. 
 
 'Exciting' blood test spots cancer a year early 
 
 Blood tests spot ovarian cancer early 
 
 Prostate cancer blood test 'helps target treatment' 
 
 The CancerSEEK test looks for mutations in 16 genes that regularly arise in cancer and eight proteins that are often released. 
 
 It was trialled on 1,005 patients with cancers in the ovary, liver, stomach, pancreas, oesophagus, colon, lung or breast that had not yet spread to other tissues. 
 
 Overall, the test found 70% of the cancers. 
 
 Dr Cristian Tomasetti, from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told the BBC: "This field of early detection is critical. 
 
 "I think this can have an enormous impact on cancer mortality." 
 
 The earlier a cancer is found, the greater the chance of being able to treat it. 
 
 Five of the eight cancers investigated have no screening programmes for early detection. 
 
 In some cases, the test also provided information about the tissue-of-origin of the cancer - but not all. 
 
 Pancreatic cancer has so few symptoms and is detected so late that four in five patients die in the year they are diagnosed. 
 
 Finding tumours when they could still be surgically removed would be "a night and day difference" for survival, said Dr Tomasetti. 
 
 CancerSEEK is now being trialled in people who have not been diagnosed with cancer, which will be the real test of its usefulness. 
 
 The hope is it can complement other screening tools such as mammograms for breast cancer and colonoscopies for colorectal cancer. 
 
 Dr Tomasetti said: "We envision a blood test we could use once a year." 
 
 Universal test? 
 
 The CancerSEEK test, reported in the journal Science, is novel because it hunts for both the mutated DNA and the proteins. 
 
 Increasing the number of mutations and proteins being analysed would allow it to test for a wider range of cancers. 
 
 Dr Gert Attard, team leader in the Centre for Evolution and Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, told the BBC: "This is of massive potential. 
 
 Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Breast cancer can be detected by the new test 
 
 "I'm enormously excited. This is the Holy Grail - a blood test to diagnose cancer without all the other procedures like scans or colonoscopy." 
 
 He said "we're very close" to using blood tests to screen for cancer as "we have the technology". 
 
 But he cautioned there was still uncertainty about what to do when a cancer was diagnosed. 
 
 In some cases, the treatment may be worse than living with a cancer that is not immediately life-threatening. 
 
 Men can already have slow growing prostate cancers closely monitored rather than treated. 
 
 "When we detect cancer in a different way, we can't take for granted that everyone will need treatment," Dr Attard said. 
 
 Early stage cancers 
 
 Prof Richard Marais, from Cancer Research UK, said it would take time to prove that it worked as an early diagnosis for cancer - at least five to six years. 
 
 "Detecting cancer early, before the disease has spread is one of the most powerful ways to improve cancer survival and this interesting research is a step towards being able to do this earlier than is currently possible." 
 
 Paul Pharoah, professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, said more work was needed to assess how the test performs when cancers are less advanced. 
 
 He said: "Demonstrating that a test can detect advanced cancers does not mean that the test will be useful in detecting early stage symptomatic cancer, much less pre-symptomatic cancer. The sensitivity for the stage 1 cancers in the study was only 40%." 
 
 And Dr Mangesh Thorat from the Centre for Cancer Prevention, Queen Mary University of London, said it looked promising "but with several caveats" 
 
 "A significant amount of further research is needed before we can even contemplate how this might play out in screening settings," he said. 
 
 "This is only a case-control study, and therefore needs further evaluation in large cohorts more representative of general population where such screening might be introduced." 
 
 The cost of CancerSEEK is less than $500 (£360) per patient, which is around the same price as a colonoscopy. 
 
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– Human blood is rich with genetic material, and scientists have in recent years taken many steps forward in decoding it. The latest announcement—that a blood test can spot cancer at its earliest stages—has the potential to save millions of lives as treatment is administered earlier in the disease's progression, reports Reuters. Reporting in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists say that by analyzing DNA fragments in blood to look for several dozen cancer-driver genes, they spotted 86 out of 138 stage 1 and stage 2 cancers; they also confirmed no trace of cancer in 44 healthy patients (in other words, there were zero false positives). Some call this minimally invasive test a "liquid biopsy." "This is one of the first studies that has looked directly at early-stage cancers," says lead author Dr. Victor Velculescu, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. While the test is proof-of-concept and not yet ready for prime time, detecting 62% of cancers that were only in stages 1 or 2 is a major milestone, experts say. For instance, less than one in five ovarian cancers are caught that early, when the survival rate is higher than 90%; those that are caught after the cancer has spread face a dramatically lower 40% survival rate five years out, per HealthDay News. For this study, however, the blood test caught early-stage ovarian cancer 68% of the time. Scientists hope they can get the test much closer to a 100% detection rate. (This cancer treatment is being hailed as the most exciting in a lifetime.)