Scientists in China created a test that needs less than 0.05 millimeters of dried blood to diagnose cancer.
Screening for specific blood biomarkers is seen as a possible method to detect cancer at earlier stages. But cancers like pancreatic, colorectal, and gastric cancers lack precise blood tests for diagnosis. As stated in the study, over a billion people across the world experience a high rate of missed disease diagnosis. There is an urgent need for diagnostic tools that have high accuracy and affordability. Can this new test help?
What makes it different?
According to the researchers, the test could identify when a patient had cancer around 82% to 100% of the time. In just a few minutes, this test showed a difference between patients with diagnosed cancer and people without cancer. Their focus was on pancreatic, gastric, or colorectal cancer.
They tested the model and how effectively this can make a difference between blood donors with and without cancer. They compared it with traditional liquid blood-based tests. The results they got showed them that the dried blood spots were also very effective in diagnosis. In the case of pancreatic cancer, they were able to detect 81.2% of cases. When it comes to liquid blood samples that was 76.8% percent.
Their assessment showed that the implementation of this tool in less-developed regions could reduce the estimated proportion of undiagnosed cases of cancers. For example, this method for population-level cancer screening in rural China could reduce undiagnosed cases by 20% to 50%. Especially when it comes to colorectal, gastric, and colorectal cancers.
This cancer test won’t enter use for a long time, said Chaoyuan Kuang who was not involved in the study. According to him, we are still years away from being able to offer this test to patients.
Rural China
In a study from 2022, scientists included 1,570 cancer survivors from three urban districts and five rural counties. The results showed that 84.1% were diagnosed with cancer after developing symptoms. Compared with urban cancer patients, rural ones were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer after developing symptoms. Also, they were less likely to visit more than one hospital. This means that rural cancer patients had fewer screenings and treatments than urban ones.
What is behind it?
Dried serum spots (DSS) are small samples of serum that have been dried. When it dries it is stored for later analysis, usually used in different diagnostic tests. In the case of cancer diagnosis, the use of dried blood spots can be a challenge. The reason is in the degradation of sensitive biomarkers and the often inadequate amount of blood for reliable results.
So the researchers propose the use of inorganic nanoparticles to improve cancer diagnostics. In particular, the focus is on enhanced mass spectrometry (NPELDI MS), which provides reliable results with better sensitivity. It involves the application of inorganic nanoparticles to enhance selectively concentrate and enrich metabolic compounds from samples.” However, the adaptation of NPELDI MS to dried spot analysis has not been validated,” they noted. That is an obstacle that needs to be solved. Due to need necessity of standardized work procedures to enable reliability in all laboratories.
Based on a machine learning model they created, they found that these DSS samples preserved important biological markers. That is crucial for improving diagnostic accuracy. Those machine models are a form of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms, for example, for the diagnosis of cancer.
What is the catch?
This is a “great start,” Kuang said, but more testing is needed, due to many reasons. For example, they only tested a few hundred samples, and also they tested the machine learning model on people who were already known to have cancer. Meaning that it has to be confirmed how it works as a real diagnostic tool.
A blood test like this would need to go through “extensive clinical trials”. That includes thousands of patients and regulatory review, Dr. Michael Cecchini told .
