An experimental blood test detects early-stage pancreatic cancer more effectively than other available tests, reports a new study published in Cancer Letters. The findings pave the way for further evaluation of the test in a clinical setting, an important step toward approval as a potential diagnostic method for pancreatic cancer. Catching pancreatic cancer early dramatically improves survival, but our current tools for doing so are limited.
Our results reveal that our combination test improves accurate detection of pancreatic cancer in a lab setting by 27%. The next step is to evaluate the test's effectiveness in a clinical lab rather than academic lab." Brian Haab, Ph.
D., study's co-corresponding author, professor at Van Andel Institute The new test works by detecting two sugars -; CA199.STRA and CA19-9 -; that are produced by pancreatic cancer cells and escape into the bloodstream.
CA19-9 is the current gold-standard biomarker for pancreatic cancer. Haab's lab identified CA199.STRA as a cancer biomarker and developed the technology to detect it.
On its own, the CA19-9 test correctly identified only 44% of pancreatic cancer samples in the lab. When CA199.STRA was added, the new combination test correctly identified 71% of pancreatic cancer samples.
The combination test also greatly reduced the number of false negatives while maintaining a low false positive rate. Low rates of false positives and false negatives are important because they reflect the test's ability to correc.