Researchers have said a groundbreaking new blood test that can detect eight common types of cancer before they spread will save countless lives.

They said “liquid biopsy” – developed in the US – would be a game-changer in the fight against cancer, and hoped it could be widely available within a few years.

The test was able to detect tumours about 70% of the time on average in more than 1,000 patients with early-stage cancer. Crucially, it did so before the cancers had spread, giving patients the best chance of beating the disease.

It works by looking for mutated DNA that dying cells shed into the blood, and protein biomarkers associated with bowel, breast, liver, lung, oesophageal, ovarian, pancreatic and stomach cancer.

Professor Peter Gibbs, from the Walter and Eliza Institute in Melbourne, who has worked on the test, dubbed CancerSEEK, said he thought it would save thousands of lives. He hoped it would become widely available, and affordable, before too long.

“For the first time we’re seeing a potential for a blood test that can screen for many types of nasty cancers that up until now, we’ve had to wait until symptoms [arise] and diagnose quite late,” Gibbs told the ABC.

It has proved effective in detecting cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, that often result in few if any symptoms until the disease is well advanced, often meaning death for the patient.

Gibbs said many more people would be willing to have a simple blood test than undergo unpleasant and invasive screening procedures, such as colonoscopies.

With cancer risks rising from the age of 50, he said, the test would be most important to older people, but also for younger people whose family histories might put them in a high-risk category.

The test, developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US, is now being tested on 10,000 more people.

“The big question is going to be the cost,” Gibbs said. “I suspect currently you’re looking at $1,000 or something like that ... but as with most technologies, and scale, things get a lot cheaper over time ... hopefully that’ll drop to a few hundred dollars.”

The research was published in the journal Science.







