A blood test for lung cancer is being released commercially across the United States this week.

The makers of the early Cancer Detection lung test (CDT) hope it will help more people survive lung cancer.

Currently sufferers are diagnosed on their symptoms, which means it can often be too late for treatment.

The makers of the new test say it will improve diagnosis of the disease and Australian support groups are campaigning for the test to be available here.

Professor John Robertson of Nottingham University in Britain led the research and says the test identifies defences released by the human body in response to the earliest stages of the cancer.

He and his team are hoping the research could be adapted to diagnose many other common cancers.

"We already have got evidence and research that all sorts of tumours we've looked at... induce immune responses in patients, and so the future will be to identify specific antigens, which are related to that type of cancer," he said.

Each year up to 9,000 Australians are diagnosed with lung cancer, with many dying from the disease within 12 months.

Dr Kwun Fong, chair of the Australian Lung Cancer Foundation, is a chest physician at the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane.

He says anything that can improve detection rates should be welcomed.

"Certainly a simpler blood test, which is minimally invasive, would provide a great improvement on the technologies we have so far," he said.

"This is hopefully going to be like the situation in prostate cancer where there is a reasonably active marker we can use in our clinical judgments."

According to Professor Robertson, the early CDT has a 40 per cent success rate in identifying cancer.

But Dr Fong expressed some caution.

"We need to take them through to the proper clinical trials to show they are effective, safe and cost effective for our patients," he said.

"This does sound very promising. We just have to see the data, which hasn't to my knowledge been published yet."

Cancer Council NSW chief executive Dr Andrew Penman says he is also cautiously optimistic.

"The gold standard test is whether it improves survival," he said.

"The fact it's now in use, in practice in the US gives us an opportunity to demonstrate whether it does its stuff in real life in real people, and if it does I'd be very hopeful we can have it in Australia."

The test was developed over a 15-year period of research and is being released first in the US and then in Britain before potentially becoming available worldwide.