A new study has found a hopeful way to help doctors find and monitor cancer using just a blood test.
This research was done by scientists from Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center. It was published on April 11 in the journal Nature Methods.
This discovery could make it possible for people to have regular blood tests that find cancer early or check if it comes back after treatment.
The research team created a better way to look at the entire DNA in a blood sample. Their method is so sensitive it can find extremely small amounts of cancer DNA—sometimes just one part in a million.
This special type of DNA is called circulating tumor DNA, or ctDNA. It comes from cancer cells and floats in the bloodstream. Measuring ctDNA can help doctors see how much cancer is in the body and whether treatments are working.
Before now, looking so deeply into someone’s DNA was too costly to use often. But this team used a new, more affordable sequencing machine made by Ultima Genomics.
It reads a person’s full DNA in great detail, but at a lower cost. The more deeply the machine reads the DNA, the easier it is to find even the tiniest traces of cancer.
One thing that makes this method especially powerful is an extra step the scientists added to check for mistakes. DNA has two strands that are mirror images of each other. By comparing both strands, the team could find and remove errors, which made the test more accurate than older methods.
In their study, the researchers tested blood samples from people with bladder cancer and melanoma. They were able to find cancer DNA in the blood.
They also noticed that the amount of ctDNA went up when the cancer returned or worsened, and went down when the treatment worked. This means the test could help not only find cancer but also keep track of how it’s changing.
Dr. Dan Landau, the lead scientist of the study and a cancer doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said this new method is a big step forward. Because it’s cheaper and more accurate, it could soon be used in regular healthcare.
Another researcher, Dr. Bishoy Faltas, said that checking for each cancer’s unique DNA patterns made the test even better at finding cancer.
With more research and clinical trials, this discovery could lead to simple blood tests that help find cancer early, monitor it over time, and guide treatment—without needing surgeries or other invasive procedures.
If you care about cancer, please read studies that artificial sweeteners are linked to higher cancer risk, and how drinking milk affects risks of heart disease and cancer.
For more health information, please see recent studies about the best time to take vitamins to prevent heart disease, and results showing vitamin D supplements strongly reduces cancer death.
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