Researchers have revealed that a blood sample can soon be enough to diagnose many types of solid cancers, or to monitor the amount of cancer in a patient's body and responses to treatment.
The researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a way to accurately identify about 50 percent of people with stage-1 lung cancer and all patients whose cancers were more advanced.
Maximilian Diehn, assistant professor of radiation oncology, said that they are set out to develop a method that overcomes two major hurdles in the circulating tumor DNA field.
Diehn said that the technique needs to be very sensitive to detect the very small amounts of tumor DNA present in the blood and it's necessary to have a test that works off the shelf for the majority of patients with a given cancer.
The researchers found that when they applied the technique to patients with non-small-cell lung cancer, they could detect disease in all patients with stage-2 or higher disease, and in half of those with stage-1, the earliest stage of disease.
The study was published in Nature Medicine.