Blood Test for Cancer

[FIREd_2015]

Interesting article on new blood test for 50 different cancers.

"A novel blood test that can detect up to 50 different cancers from a single blood draw is gaining traction in the United States. The Galleri blood test is being now offered by a number of US health networks..."

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/978826

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/951268

 

[euro]

Peter Attia had a recent podcast on this topic with one of the top scientists in this field. There has definitely been progress in the filed of "liquid biopsies" but we are a good way away from a viable solution. The main issue is that the sensitivity of such tests is just not good enough yet to detect the presence of cancer in very early stages. In fact, for now, the scanning methods we have are still superior in sensitivity and they generally cannot pick up tumors smaller than 1cm. In other words, they miss most stage 1 cancers, and so do the current liquid biopsy tests. That said, chances are that they will get more sensitive with further optimization. Also, for certain applications such as monitoring progress of treatments, they are already quite useful.