NIH-supported investigators developed a “blood test to find pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, one of the deadliest forms of cancer.”
Only about “1 in 10 pancreatic cancer patients survive more than five years from diagnosis. However, experts expect that when the cancer is found and treated at an earlier stage, survival would improve. While finding the cancer early is key, there are no current screening methods to do so.”
Researchers included two blood biomarkers previously explored for use in identifying pancreatic cancer (CA19-9 and THBS2), but found that neither worked well as a screening tool. However, analyzing banked blood samples led the research team to “two novel biomarker proteins that were elevated in the blood of early-stage pancreatic patients compared with healthy volunteers” – ANPEP and PIGR.
Combining those two biomarkers with the first two they tried “successfully distinguished pancreatic cancer cases from non-cases 91.9% of the time for all stages combined at a false positive rate of 5% in non-cases. Similarly, for early-stage (stage I/II) cancer, the four-marker test identified 87.5% of cases.” The test “successfully distinguished cancer patients from both healthy individuals and those with non-cancerous pancreatic conditions, such as pancreatitis.”
