New blood test can detect cancer 3 years before symptoms

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Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a cutting-edge blood test that can detect signs of cancer three years before any symptoms surface.

The breakthrough could help doctors diagnose cancer long before today’s screening tools allow, giving patients a better shot at beating the disease.

“Three years earlier provides time for intervention,” Dr. Yuxuan Wang, an assistant professor of oncology and lead researcher of the study, said in a statement.

“The tumors are likely to be much less advanced and more likely to be curable,” she added.

For the study, Wang and her colleagues analyzed blood samples from 52 people involved in a large National Institutes of Health-funded research project on cardiovascular health.

Half were later diagnosed with cancer within six months of giving blood. The rest stayed cancer-free.

The researchers ran the samples through a multicancer early detection (MCED) test, which uses ultra-sensitive sequencing to hunt for tiny shards of mutated DNA that tumors leak into the bloodstream.

It detected signs of cancer in 8 of the 26 future patients.

But here’s the kicker: Six of those patients had older blood samples on file — and in four of them, early signs of cancer were already lurking more than three years before their diagnosis.

“This study shows the promise of MCED tests in detecting cancers very early, and sets the benchmark sensitivities required for their success,” said senior author Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a professor of oncology and co-director of the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins.

Right now, no MCED tests are fully approved by the FDA for widespread use, though some are commercially available under looser rules as Laboratory Developed Tests.

While MCED tests aren’t intended to replace standard screenings, experts say they could play an important role in spotting cancers earlier — especially those, like colon cancer, that are often diagnosed at advanced stages.

“Detecting cancers years before their clinical diagnosis could help provide management with a more favourable outcome,” said Nickolas Papadopoulos, a professor of oncology and senior author of the study. 

“Of course, we need to determine the appropriate clinical follow-up after a positive test for such cancers,” he added. 

Among the eight participants whose cancers the MCED test detected months before diagnosis, five died from the disease — underscoring how deadly cancer can be when caught too late.

For example, the five-year survival rate for breast cancer is 99% when detected early, but drops to less than 32% once the disease has spread, according to the American Cancer Society.

Excluding non-melanoma skin cancers, the group estimates more than 2 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed in the US in 2025 — with over 618,000 people expected to die from the disease.

That breaks down to roughly 1,700 deaths every single day.