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Research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego suggests a personalised blood test could be developed to detect cancer, and could be available within the next five years.
Dr Caroline Wright, Head of Science, Foundation for Genomics and Population Health, said:
“Whilst the normal caveats about the need for further clinical validation obviously apply, this novel application of next generation sequencing technology potentially has enormous clinical benefits for monitoring treatment response and screening patients in remission. However, evidence is still needed to show that this approach would actually allow recurrent cancers to be detected before they could be found by other conventional methods, such as imaging, and then treated before causing symptoms. Although whole genome sequencing is currently more expensive than CT scanning, given the falling costs and development of ever faster and cheaper next generation sequencing technologies, this situation is likely to be reversed within the next few years.
“This method represents an important foray into offering truly personalised medicine. Moreover, because it is based on the analysis of somatic genetic changes, rather than an individual’s inherited genetic code, many of the complex ethical, legal and social issues raised by personal genome profiling are avoided.”
Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said:
“This is another exciting step down the road towards personalised cancer medicine. The detection of DNA changes, unique to individual cancers, has proved to be a powerful tool in guiding the treatment of leukaemia.
“If this can be done for other types of cancer like bowel, breast and prostate it will help us to bring new treatments to patients better and faster than ever.”