Screening for lung cancer is by and large an expensive and time-consuming process which can only be done by larger medical facilities. But Nanjing doctors now look set to change all that, with a new procedure involving just one small vial of blood.
Lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer. According to the latest global cancer statistics released by the World Health Organisation in 2020, there were 9.96 million cancer deaths worldwide that year, among which 1.8 million were from lung cancer.
In fighting that, scientists and clinical experts believe that early detection, diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer are essential to prolong survival of patients, reduce economic burden and improve quality of life.
Professors Xu Lin and Yin Rong from the Jiangsu Cancer Hospital in Nanjing are among the authors of the study, “Multi-Dimensional Cell-free DNA Fragmentomic Assay for Detection of Early-Stage Lung Cancer”.
Given the expensive, time consuming and, in some cases, unreliable, methods for early detection of lung cancer, the professors wondered whether there was a way that can reduce social costs, improve accuracy and have wider availability.
As the provincial cancer centre, Jiangsu Cancer Hospital is a quality control unit for gene sequencing, and thoracic surgery is a national key specialty.
Published recently by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine after more than a year of critical review, the study set out to establish an accurate and affordable approach for early-stage lung cancer detection by integrating cfDNA fragmentomics and machine learning models.
A sample pool included 350 non-cancer and 432 cancer participants.
In a report on 10 February, Prof. Yin excitedly revealed to the Yangtze Evening News that the specificity and accuracy of their new screening method reached 90 percent through the comparative study of some cohorts.
The professors’ research is based on the early-screening technology of liquid biopsy, using a model established by the histological characteristics of freed DNA cell fragments.
The study’s 11 other contributing authors come from Nanjing Medical University, and Geneseeq Technology Inc. in both Nanjing and Toronto, Canada.