Head and neck cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) are on the rise in the United States, now accounting for about 70 percent of cases.
Yet unlike cervical cancer, which has routine HPV-based screening, there has been no test to detect HPV-related head and neck cancers before symptoms appear.
Most patients are diagnosed only after the cancer has grown large enough to spread, often requiring aggressive treatments with lifelong side effects.
Researchers at Mass General Brigham may have found a solution.
In a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they describe a new blood test, called HPV-DeepSeek, that can spot these cancers up to 10 years before diagnosis.
The test works by searching for tiny fragments of HPV DNA in the bloodstream, which are shed when a tumor begins to form.
“This is the first time we’ve shown that we can accurately detect HPV-associated cancers in people with no symptoms, many years before diagnosis,” said lead author Dr. Daniel Faden, a head and neck surgical oncologist at Mass Eye and Ear.
“By the time most patients come to us, they need treatments that can cause major, lasting side effects. A test like HPV-DeepSeek could help us intervene much earlier, improving both outcomes and quality of life.”
The technology behind HPV-DeepSeek relies on whole-genome sequencing and advanced machine learning. Earlier work from the team demonstrated that the test had 99 percent accuracy when diagnosing patients at the time of their first clinical visit, outperforming existing diagnostic tools.
To see if the test could work years before diagnosis, the researchers analyzed stored blood samples from the Mass General Brigham Biobank.
They studied 28 samples from people who later developed HPV-related head and neck cancer and 28 from healthy controls.
HPV-DeepSeek detected tumor DNA in 22 of the 28 future cancer cases, while none of the control samples tested positive. The earliest detection came from a blood sample collected nearly eight years before diagnosis.
When researchers applied machine learning to refine the test, its accuracy improved even further, correctly identifying 27 out of 28 cancer cases—including samples collected up to a decade before diagnosis.
The team is now validating these results in a larger study using hundreds of blood samples from the National Cancer Institute’s Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial.
If successful, HPV-DeepSeek could become the first reliable screening tool for HPV-associated head and neck cancers, allowing for much earlier detection and potentially less aggressive treatment.
For patients, this could mean not only a greater chance of survival but also a better quality of life after treatment. As Dr. Faden put it, “Catching these cancers at their earliest stages gives us the best opportunity to save lives and minimize suffering.”
If you care about cancer risk, please read studies that exercise may stop cancer in its tracks, and vitamin D can cut cancer death risk.
For more health information, please see recent studies that yogurt and high-fiber diet may cut lung cancer risk, and results showing that new cancer treatment may reawaken the immune system.
Source: KSR.
