Knowing that white blood cells are under stress when fighting cancer, researchers decided to further stress the white blood cells by exposing them to UV light. They took blood samples from 208 subjects, 94 of were healthy and 114 who’d been referred to specialists for treatment of yet-to-be-determined illnesses. After stressing the white blood cells with UV light and measuring the damage done to DNA within the cells, the researchers found that more damage occurred in people who were ultimately diagnosed with cancer, meaning blood from people with cancer was distinguishable from the blood of people who were cancer-free. While it’s currently possible to tell whether you’re suffering from certain kinds of cancers by testing blood, those tests are specialized—they look for a specific marker within the blood that points to a specific type of cancer. “We know that not all cancers are the same, even within the same cancer type, like breast cancer,” says Francisco J. Esteva, MD, director of breast medical oncology at New York University Langone Medical Center, who was not affililiated with the study. “Those different subtypes mean you’d need an extensive panel done to look for each molecular marker to make a diagnosis. But this new method, if the results are validated, would be a general way to look for different types of cancer with one test.” The results could indeed have wide-reaching effects: Cancer could be easily ruled out in patients presenting with cancer-like symptoms but suffering from non-cancer illnesses, invasive diagnostic procedures like colonoscopies and biopsies could become unnecessary, and most importantly, cancer could be detected earlier than ever, increasing the odds of survival. “These are early results completed on three different types of cancer and we accept that more research needs to be done; but these results so far are remarkable,” Diana Anderson, PhD, study author and chair of life sciences at the University of Bradford, said in a statement. A clinical trial to examine the test’s effectiveness is currently underway at the university, but the researchers are confident that they’ve got a game-changer on their hands. “The possibility of these results happening by chance is 1 in 1000,” said Anderson. “We believe that this confirms the test’s potential as a diagnostic tool.”
