Simple blood test shows promise for personalizing lung cancer therapy

A single blood test could help doctors predict how lung cancer patients will respond to treatment before therapy begins, Australian-led research reveals, El.kz cites Xinhua.

Focusing on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease, the study showed how analyzing proteins in a blood sample could support earlier and better-informed treatment decisions, said a statement from Australia's University of Queensland (UQ) released Wednesday.

The approach could change how treatment decisions are made, "a step towards truly personalized lung cancer care," said Associate Professor Arutha Kulasinghe from UQ's Frazer Institute.

"We want to use a patient's own biology to guide treatment decisions at diagnosis," said Kulasinghe, who led the study published in npj Precision Oncology.

"At the moment, clinicians often have to make treatment decisions without a clear picture of how a patient will respond. What we're showing is that information already exists in the blood," he said.

Researchers collected blood from NSCLC patients before and after surgery and immunotherapy, then measured thousands of proteins and applied statistical modelling to identify signals linked to treatment response and disease progression.

"If we can tell from a blood sample who is most likely to relapse, or who will respond to immunotherapy, we can match patients to the right treatment sooner," Kulasinghe said, adding the findings were validated on an independent testing platform.

Researchers said blood-based monitoring would be "far less invasive than repeat biopsies and could give us earlier warning of recurrence" in lung cancer, which kills more people than any other cancer worldwide. The team is exploring whether the method can be applied to other cancers.