A new prototype pancreas cancer test could greatly improve the life expectancy of those suffering from this condition, which is often deadly due to the fact that there aren't many accurate ways to detect it, though this new blood test apparently has no margin of error in detection.
The high death rate for patients of this cancer comes due to the fact that it's often diagnosed when it's on its later stages, but this new pancreas cancer test, currently under development, could actually detect the illness before it has widely expanded across the endocrine organ and throughout the rest of the body.
According to Science Daily, the new pancreas cancer test was developed at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and it was recently published through a research paper in Nature journal under the name "Glypican-1 identifies cancer exosomes and detects early pancreatic cancer."
The Independent reports that the logic behind the pancreas cancer test is detecting vesicles in the bloodstream (small tissue droplets), after they've broken off from cells in pancreatic tumors; to detect this, the researchers behind the blood test look for a particular protein called GPC1 that can only be found in cancer cells.
"DNA, RNA and proteins can be isolated from cancer exosomes isolated from stored specimen for further genetic and biological analyses," said professor Raghu Kalluri, one of the leading researchers behind the new pancreas cancer test, according to Medical News Today. "Therefore, cancer exosomes are not just a biomarker but isolating them provides a trove of cancer-specific information."
The first stages of development of the pancreas cancer test surveyed approximately 250 patients, and the results so far were 100 percent accurate, with no false positives or false negatives whatsoever; in fact, the test ended up being so precise that it could even differentiate between those patients who suffered from chronic pancreatitis and those who were in different stages of the cancer.
