The National Health Service in England deploys blood tests for lung cancer screening.
Juana Summers, host:
The England’s health system said it would deploy new cancer tests known as liquid biopsy, first to 15,000 patients with lung cancer, then many others. Experts say that technology is revolutionary because it can detect the disease faster without surgery. Yuki Noguchi of NPR has more.
Yuki Noguchi, Byline: UCLA pathology teacher, Jasmine Zhou, sought the capacity of liquid biopsy to detect things, such as liver cancer from a blood bottle. This is how it sums up the potential savings associated with its use.
Jasmine Zhou: Time economy, money economy and pain economy.
Noguchi: Liquid biopsy is essentially a blood test which identifies DNA fragments rejected by cancer cells in the body.
Zhou: Cancer is actually a genetic disease.
Noguchi: For this reason, says Zhou, these DNA fragments can be decoded to identify the patient’s cancer subtype. This allows a more personalized treatment using drugs and therapies designed to target this specific tumor. Targeting does not only reduce side effects. It is more effective and a great reason why many more people survive cancer. Zhou says that technology is still new and sometimes cannot detect the disease at its first stage. But it is so promising that an alternative to surgery, it applauds the national health service of England to adopt it. Based on its successful pilot program, the NHS will now use blood tests as the first screening line for patients with lung cancer in England. Zhou hopes that other countries will follow his example.
Zhou: It really gave an example for the world.
Noguchi: It plans to deploy similar screening programs for breast cancers and others as well. This could shorten the processing time, depending on the health service, and potentially avoid unnecessary tests or even chemotherapy for certain patients. Already, he said that his pilot program had saved 11 million British pounds, or nearly $ 15 million, in annual costs. Ryan Schoenfeld, CEO of the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, a non -profit organization in New York putting on the cancer market. He says that, while England is now the world leader, liquid biopsy is also increasingly used in the United States.
Ryan Schoenfeld: You can use liquid biopsy to be more dynamic, more agile, to change therapy, to find the right therapy. So it has a lot of potential for patients.
Noguchi: And in the long term, he says, he hopes that he will be used to detect more cancers earlier. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News.
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