HEALTHTIPS: New Way To Diagnose Cancer With Simple And Cheap Blood Test

A new way to diagnose cancer: Simple and cheap blood test is the first EVER to simultaneously identify if a patient has the disease and if it has spread

In a first for cancer diagnosis, a cheap and simple-to-administer test has shown the ability to tell if a patient has the disease as well as if it has spread, or ‘metastasised’.

Developed by a team of researchers led from the University of Oxford, the test uses magnetic fields and radio waves to measure ‘metabolites’ in the blood.

Healthy individuals, people with localised cancer and those with metastatic cancer have metabolomic profiles that can be distinguished by the team’s algorithms.

The test, the team said, works on a range of different cancers and can identify the presence of the disease even in patients with non-specific symptoms.

Being both rapid and inexpensive, it may help overcome some of the usual barriers to early cancer diagnosis and improve the success rate of subsequent treatments.

The approach is different to those traditionally used to test for cancer, which have typically relied on detecting the presence of genetic material from tumours.
Cancer cells have unique metabolomic fingerprints due to their different metabolic processes,’ explained lead paper author and oncologist James Larkin of the University of Oxford.

‘We are only now starting to understand how metabolites produced by tumours can be used as biomarkers to accurately detect cancer.

‘We have already demonstrated that this technology can successfully identify if patients with multiple sclerosis are progressing to the later stages of disease, even before trained clinicians could tell.

‘It is very exciting that the same technology is now showing promise in other diseases, like cancer.’