New blood test detects early stage ovarian cancer

New blood test detects early stage ovarian cancer:

 Research on a bacterial toxin first discovered in Adelaide has led to the development a new blood test for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer - a disease which kills over 1000 Australian women and 150,000 globally each year.

This is progress towards early detection of ovarian cancer

New blood test detects early stage ovarian cancer

Article ID: 704249
Released: 19-Nov-2018 5:05 PM EST
Source Newsroom: University of Adelaide

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  New blood test detects early stage ovarian cancer

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CITATIONS

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications

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All Journal News, Cancer, Cell Biology, OBGYN, Women's Health

KEYWORDS

Ovarian Cancer, Blood Test

Newswise — Research on a bacterial toxin first discovered in Adelaide has led to the development a new blood test for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer - a disease which kills over 1000 Australian women and 150,000 globally each year.
The new blood test has the potential to dramatically improve early detection of the disease, although it will require further testing before it is available for clinicians.
A research team from the University of Adelaide and Griffith University have been studying the interactions between the toxin and an abnormal glycan (sugar) expressed on the surface of human cancer cells and released into the blood.
The team has now engineered a harmless portion of the toxin to enhance its specificity for the cancer glycan and used this to detect it in blood samples from women with ovarian cancer.
A paper published this month in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications has shown that the new test detected significant levels of the cancer glycan in blood samples from over 90% of women with stage 1 ovarian cancer and in 100% of samples from later stages of the disease, but not in any of the samples from healthy controls.
“Ovarian cancer is notoriously difficult to detect in its early stages, when there are more options for treatment and survival rates are better. Our new test is therefore a potential game changer,” says Professor James Paton, Director of the University of Adelaide’s Research Centre for Infectious Diseases.
Professor Michael Jennings, Deputy Director of the Institute for Glycomics at Griffith University, said: “Detection of this tumour marker may also play a role in a simple liquid biopsy to monitor disease stage and treatment.”
The team is currently seeking scientific and commercial partners to further test the technology with larger numbers of patient samples and to adapt it for mass screening.

Single Blood Test Screens for Eight Cancer Types

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/688112/?sc=mwhn

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Single Blood Test Screens for Eight Cancer Types

Provides unique new framework for early detection of the most common cancers

Article ID: 688112
Released: 18-Jan-2018 2:00 PM EST
Source Newsroom: Johns Hopkins Medicine

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  Credit: Credit: Elizabeth Cook and Kaitlin Lindsay

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P50-CA62924, P50-CA102701, CA06973, GM-07309, U01CA152753; Science

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All Journal News, Grant Funded News, Bone Health, Cancer, Local - Maryland

KEYWORDS

Joshua Cohen, Nickolas Papadopoulos, Anne Marie Lennon, Kenneth Kinzler, Bert Vogelstein,

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Newswise — Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers developed a single blood test that screens for eight common cancer types and helps identify the location of the cancer.
The test, called CancerSEEK, is a unique noninvasive, multianalyte test that simultaneously evaluates levels of eight cancer proteins and the presence of cancer gene mutations from circulating DNA in the blood. The test is aimed at screening for eight common cancer types that account for more than 60 percent of cancer deaths in the U.S. Five of the cancers covered by the test currently have no screening test.
“The use of a combination of selected biomarkers for early detection has the potential to change the way we screen for cancer, and it is based on the same rationale for using combinations of drugs to treat cancers,” says Nickolas Papadopoulos, Ph.D., senior author and professor of oncology and pathology.
The findings were published online by Science on Jan. 18, 2018.
“Circulating tumor DNA mutations can be highly specific markers for cancer. To capitalize on this inherent specificity, we sought to develop a small yet robust panel that could detect at least one mutation in the vast majority of cancers,” says Joshua Cohen, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the paper’s first author. “In fact, keeping the mutation panel small is essential to minimize false-positive results and keep such screening tests affordable.”
The investigators initially explored several hundred genes and 40 protein markers, whittling the number down to segments of 16 genes and eight proteins. They point out that this molecular test is solely aimed at cancer screening and, therefore, is different from other molecular tests, which rely on analyzing large numbers of cancer-driving genes to identify therapeutically actionable targets.
In this study, the test had greater than 99 percent specificity for cancer. “Very high specificity was essential because false-positive results can subject patients to unnecessary invasive follow-up tests and procedures to confirm the presence of cancer,” says Kenneth Kinzler, Ph.D., professor of oncology and co-director of the Ludwig Center. The test was used on 812 healthy controls and produced only seven false-positive results.
The test was evaluated on 1,005 patients with nonmetastatic, stages I to III cancers of the ovary, liver, stomach, pancreas, esophagus, colorectum, lung or breast. The median overall sensitivity, or the ability to find cancer, was 70 percent and ranged from a high of 98 percent for ovarian cancer to a low of 33 percent for breast cancer. For the five cancers that have no screening tests—ovarian, liver, stomach, pancreatic and esophageal cancers—sensitivity ranged from 69 percent to 98 percent.
“A novelty of our classification method is that it combines the probability of observing various DNA mutations together with the levels of several proteins in order to make the final call,” says Cristian Tomasetti, Ph.D., associate professor of oncology and biostatistics, who developed the algorithm. “Another new aspect of our approach is that it uses machine learning to enable the test to accurately determine the location of a tumor down to a small number of anatomic sites in 83 percent of patients.”
Although the current test does not pick up every cancer, it identifies many cancers that would likely otherwise go undetected. “Many of the most promising cancer treatments we have today only benefit a small minority of cancer patients, and we consider them major breakthroughs. If we are going to make progress in early cancer detection, we have to begin looking at it in a more realistic way, recognizing that no test will detect all cancers,” says Bert Vogelstein, M.D., co-director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
To zero in on the analytes they included in their CancerSEEK test, the research team pulled data from more than three decades of cancer genetics research generated at their Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins, where the first genetic blueprints for cancer were created, as well as data from many other institutions.
To precisely determine the optimal number of DNA bases to assess in the CancerSEEK test, the researchers used a method based on diminishing returns. “The more DNA bases you assay, the more mutations you are capable of finding, but eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns,” explains Cohen. “We designed our test to reflect this point of diminishing returns, including the DNA markers that were useful to detecting the cancers and eliminating those that did not add benefit.” The result was a relatively small panel of highly selective DNA markers.
“This test represents the next step in changing the focus of cancer research from late-stage disease to early disease, which I believe will be critical to reducing cancer deaths in the long term,” says Vogelstein.
CancerSEEK is noninvasive and can, in principle, be administered by primary care providers at the time of other routine blood work. “This has the potential to substantially impact patients. Earlier detection provides many ways to improve outcomes for patients. Optimally, cancers would be detected early enough that they could be cured by surgery alone, but even cancers that are not curable by surgery alone will respond better to systemic therapies when there is less advanced disease,” says Anne Marie Lennon, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, surgery and radiology, clinical director of gastroenterology and director of the Multidisciplinary Pancreatic Cyst Program.
The investigators feel that a test that will be used routinely for cancer screening must have a cost in line with or less than other currently available screening tests for single cancers, such as colonoscopy. They envision that the CancerSEEK test will eventually cost less than $500.
Larger studies of the test are currently under way.