Blood Test Could Provide Early Cancer Detection

A new blood test that will aid the detection of cancer as much as five years earlier than current testing methods, such as mammography and CT scans, has been developed by Oncimmune Ltd., a University of Nottingham (England) spin-out company. The commercial test uses immune-biomarkers, and replicates the cancer proteins that trigger the body’s response to the disease, as well as robotic technology to measure that response.

This science is based on the early work of John Robertson, a world-renowned breast cancer specialist and professor of surgery in the University of Nottingham’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Initial research results were derived using blood samples from patients with breast cancer and a group of high-risk women attending for annual mammography. In addition to identifying the signal in the blood of a percentage of women when they developed breast cancer, the results showed that the signal could be detected in some of the high-risk patients who had given blood samples for a number of years during their annual checkup and before they were subsequently diagnosed with cancer. When these samples were run retrospectively, it showed that the prototype assay test could have detected more than half of these cancers up to four years before they were actually diagnosed. A study involving researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. recorded similar results using blood samples from a study of CT scans to screen for lung cancer where antibodies were detected up to five years before the lung cancers were diagnosed.

Oncimmune has transferred this science into a commercial test. The test for lung cancer, EarlyCDT-Lung, was launched nationally in the U.S. in June, and it will be followed by a launch in the United Kingdom in 2011. Tests for other cancers will launch in the next few years.