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blood test can pick up cancers up to four years before symptoms appear, researchers say, in the latest study to raise hopes of early detection.
A team led by researchers in China say the non-invasive blood test – called PanSeer – detects cancer in 95% of individuals who have no symptoms but later receive a diagnosis.
“We demonstrated that five types of cancer can be detected through a DNA methylation-based blood test up to four years before conventional diagnosis,” the team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
They said the test was unlikely to be predicting cancer but rather picking up on cancerous growths that had not yet caused symptoms or been spotted by other methods.
Such tests, known as liquid biopsies, have become the focus of much research as they offer a non-invasive way to screen patients..
Could we soon be able to detect cancer in 10 minutes?
The new study is not the first to report positive results for a blood test for early detection of cancer. However, the team said the research was exciting because it showed cancers could be detected before patients showed any indication of symptoms – something few studies have shown before.

The researchers reported how the new test was based on screening particular regions of DNA found in blood plasma for telltale tags, called methyl groups, that often crop up in tumour DNA. The team said they used techniques that allowed them to pick up even very small levels of such DNA.
They then used machine learning algorithms – a type of artificial intelligence – to develop a system that could determine whether any DNA found circulating in the blood was indeed shed by tumours, based on the presence of these methyl groups.
To develop the test, the team used blood plasma samples collected from individuals in China between 2007 and 2014 as part of a wider research endeavour.

Overall, 414 samples were used from participants who remained cancer-free at least five years after the blood was taken, and 191 samples were used from participants who were diagnosed with stomach, colorectal, liver, lung or oesophageal cancer within four years of the blood being collected. The team also used samples from biobanks from 223 patients already diagnosed with one of the five cancers.
After training the system on about half of the samples, the team tested their approach on the remainder.
The results revealed PanSeer flagged cancer in 88% of participants who had already been diagnosed and in 95% of participants who were not diagnosed with cancer but later went on to develop the disease. The test correctly identified those without cancer 96% of the time.
The study has limitations, including that it is based on a relatively small number of samples, storage was not optimal, and the team has raised some concerns about possible contamination. Also, the test cannot identify which type of cancer an individual has.

But Dr Eric Klein, of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute, who was part of a team that pr

After Susan Raphael received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in October 2018, she was treated successfully with surgery, radiation and 12 rounds of chemotherapy. Then, in February 2020, a PET scan revealed a Sister Mary Joseph nodule, a small abdominal lump near her navel that was a sign her disease had metastasized.

Raphael, who lives in Topanga, California, could have tried different chemotherapy, but her oncologists discovered a clinical trial that they believed offered a better chance of beating the disease. Participants receive a combination of two experimental drugs, along with the chemotherapy treatments nab-paclitaxel and gemcitabine.

One of the drugs is an immunotherapy that blocks PD-1, a so-called checkpoint protein that prevents the immune system from going into overdrive, making it difficult for immune cells to recognize and attack cancer. The other is a targeted drug that inhibits CD73, a protein that also suppresses the immune system and has been associated with a poor prognosis in several tumor types, including pancreatic cancer. Raphael receives the chemotherapy by infusion every week for three weeks and the immunotherapy and targeted drug every other week, taking a week off between cycles.

As of the end of April, Raphael’s nodule had shrunk and a blood test revealed a significant drop in her levels of carbohydrate antigen 19-9, a protein released by pancreatic cancer cells. She will remain on the regimen as long as her cancer responds to it.

Although she has had some hair loss, stomach upset and anemia, the side effects have not prevented her from working full time as a film producer and staying active outside of the office. “I exercise every day, I’m painting, and I continue to work,” says Raphael, 64. “I have a lot of energy.”

Combination treatments offer new choices for treating patients with cancers that haven’t traditionally responded well to immunotherapy, including cancers of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and breast and ovarian tumors. The combinations are designed to target specific characteristics of tumors, such as excess production of cancer-promoting proteins caused by genetic mutations, in ways that may make them more responsive to immune-boosting treatments.

A lower total dose of radiotherapy delivered in fewer but larger doses is as safe in the long term as breast cancer radiotherapy courses giving multiple small doses, according to the final results of a 10-year study.

The findings show that five larger radiotherapy doses after surgery – once-a-week sessions for five weeks instead of daily radiotherapy over the same time, totalling 25 doses – cause similarly low rates of side-effects in women with early-stage breast cancer in the long run.

Fewer treatment sessions particularly benefit patients at low risk of relapse who cannot tolerate daily radiation over long periods of time because of frailty or other chronic conditions. The 10-year study offers reassurance to these women over the long-term safety of the approach.

The 10-year results of the FAST trial, led by The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and funded by Cancer Research UK, are published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Reducing side-effects

The FAST trial, launched in 2004, compared radiotherapy schedules consisting of fewer but larger fractions overall, while decreasing the total dose of radiation, in order to see which course was best at reducing side-effects.

The three-year results of the FAST trial were published in 2011 and showed that reducing the number of radiotherapy fractions to five was feasible and safe in the short term.

Since then, FAST has informed the design of the FAST-Forward trial, also led by The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), which looks at delivering the five fractions of radiotherapy in a single week. This has also been found to be safe and effective.

The 10-year results from the FAST trial now confirm that a treatment strategy involving fewer doses and fewer visits to hospital is as safe in the long term, since side-effects remain low a decade later.

Radiotherapy uses X-rays to destroy cancer cells that may be left behind after breast cancer surgery. As a consequence, having radiotherapy after surgery lowers the risk of the cancer coming back – but the radiation can affect healthy tissue around the site of the surgery and on rare occasions can result in serious side effects.

Comparing radiotherapy regimens

Some 915 women from 19 centres across the UK who had early-stage breast cancer participated in the FAST trial. Researchers assigned women to one of three different courses of radiotherapy following breast cancer surgery – a regimen of daily doses and two courses delivering five larger doses once weekly, all over the same time period of five weeks.

After completing the radiotherapy regimens, women were assessed annually for up to 10 years by researchers for side effects to healthy breast tissue – including hardening of the breast, swelling, skin reactions and changes in breast size.

The standard radiotherapy regimen consisted of the now outdated international standard of 50 Gray (Gy) of radiation, divided into 25 daily doses of 2 Gy, delivered every day over five

GUYS DONT FORGET THE TWEET GROUND BREAKING NEWS HAVE FAITH

Scientists have revealed details of the discovery of a new cancer drug that could be used to treat a range of cancer types, including some blood cancers and solid tumours.

The drug, called fadraciclib, was jointly discovered by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, in collaboration with the company Cyclacel.

It is already being tested in early clinical trials targeting select haematological malignancies and solid tumours.

In a new publication in the journal PLOS One, a team of scientists from Cyclacel and the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) describe the discovery of fadraciclib, formerly known as CYC065, and describe its mechanism of action and therapeutic properties.

Fadraciclib is a leading dual inhibitor of two cancer-driving proteins from the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) family, CDK2 and CDK9.

CDK2/9 inhibitor

It was designed by improving the chemical properties of a previous CDK inhibitor drug from Cyclacel, called seliciclib, on which the ICR and Cyclacel had collaborated previously.

These structural design modifications led to a 20-fold more potent activity against the CDK2 and CDK9 targets and an equivalent 30-fold increase in therapeutic potency against a panel of human cancer cells, as well as a high degree of selectivity versus a wide range of 256 other protein kinases.

The researchers also provide clear evidence that CDK2 and CDK9 are inhibited in fadraciclib-treated cancer cells, leading to altered gene expression and cell death by apoptosis.

In the published research, which was largely funded by Cyclacel, the researchers also describe experiments in cells and mice that demonstrate fadraciclib’s potential as a treatment for leukaemia. The team found that fadraciclib inhibited the growth of human acute myeloid leukaemia tumours growing in immune-deprived mice by up to 100%.

A particularly important effect that the researchers observed in cancer cells treated with fadraciclib was a profound and sustained decrease in the levels of MCL1 – a protein involved in cancer cell survival and drug resistance. To exploit this effect further, they evaluated fadraciclib in combination with drugs that target other cancer survival and drug resistance proteins in the BCL2 family and observed synergistic anticancer activity.

Biomarkers

The results are consistent with a 2018 study led by ICR researchers that showed the similar beneficial activity of a close analogue of fadraciclib – a molecule with a similar structure also arising from the collaborative research programme – in combination with a BCL2-targeting drug against bowel cancer cells.

In the new paper the researchers also found an association between sensitivity to fadraciclib and levels of the MCL1 and BCL2 proteins in cancer cells, and also the presence of ‘rearranged’ copies of a gene called MLL (mixed lineage leukaemia)

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