Cancer detection is about to undergo a major shift as early results confirm the accuracy of new blood tests, a major conference has heard.
Doctors should get ready for this change as should planners, experts said at the conference of the European Society of Medical Oncology yesterday.
The conference heard the results of the PATHFINDER study, which involved 6,621 people.
This found signs of cancer in 1.4% of patients – and this was confirmed in 38% of cases. The UK has a major national randomised study, the NHS-Galleri study, involving 140,000 people.
Researcher Deb Schrag, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA, said: “The results are an important first step for early cancer detection tests because they showed a good detection rate for people who had cancer and an excellent specificity rate for those who did not have cancer.
“In people with a positive test, it took less than two months to confirm the diagnosis if they had cancer and it took a bit longer if they did not have cancer primarily because physicians opted to perform imaging studies and then repeat them a second time several months later to investigate the possibility of a cancer diagnosis.”
Dr Schrag added: “An important finding was that few participants with a false positive screening test required multiple invasive procedures such as endoscopies and biopsies. This finding should help to allay concerns that these tests could cause harm by generating unnecessary procedures in people who are well.”
Professor Fabrice André, the ESMO scientific co-chair, said: “It is a duty of professional societies like ESMO to raise awareness of the fact that within the next five years, we will need more doctors, surgeons and nurses, together with more diagnostic and treatment infrastructure, to care for the rising number of people who will be identified by multi-cancer early detection tests.
“We need to involve all stakeholders in deciding new pathways of care. We need to agree who will be tested and when and where tests will be carried out, and to anticipate the changes that will happen as a result of these tests, for example in the diagnosis and treatment of people with pancreatic and other cancers that are usually diagnosed at a much later stage.”
Abstract 903O A prospective study of a multi-cancer early detection blood test. ESMO 11 September 2022
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