Researchers unveil advances in cancer diagnostics

Scientists unveiled a test Monday for detecting pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms, in less than a drop of blood. The diagnostic method is fast, cheap and ultra-sensitive, and can be adapted to test for other diseases whose fingerprints are detectible in blood, they wrote in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
A team in the United States and China identified a protein dubbed EphA2 found in pancreatic tumours. They then developed a test to detect its presence in as little as 0.001 millilitres of blood plasma - the liquid component of blood, in which the cells are suspended.
Cancer of the pancreas is a particularly aggressive type. Symptoms generally appear at a very late stage, which means diagnosis happens only after the cancer has already spread to other organs.
In the absence of an effective treatment, some 80 percent of people die within a year of diagnosis.
"Pancreatic cancer is one type of cancer we desperately need an early blood biomarker for," said study co-author Tony Hu of Arizona State University.
Existing tests to detect cancer markers in blood require large samples, and are time-consuming and costly, the researchers said.
In a pilot study, the new test was correct more than 85 percent of the time in distinguishing pancreatic cancer patients from healthy people and people suffering from pancreatitis - a non-cancerous inflammation.