cancer detection Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Cancers Can Be Detected in the Bloodstream Three Years Prior to Diagnosis

The AHA! Team — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 05:20:22 +0000

Johns Hopkins Medicine via Newswise – The study, partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published May 22 in Cancer Discovery. Genetic material shed by tumors can be detected in the bloodstream three years prior to cancer diagnosis, according to a study led by investigators at the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published May 22 in Cancer Discovery. Investigators were surprised they could detect cancer-derived mutations in the blood so much earlier, says lead study author Yuxuan Wang, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Three years earlier provides time for intervention. The tumors are likely to be much less advanced and more likely to be curable.” To determine how early cancers could be detected prior to clinical signs or symptoms, Wang and colleagues assessed plasma samples that were collected for the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, a large National Institutes of Health-funded study to investigate risk factors for heart attack, stroke, heart failure and other cardiovascular diseases. They used highly accurate and sensitive sequencing techniques to analyze blood samples from 26 participants in the ARIC study who were diagnosed with cancer within six months after sample collection, and 26 from similar participants who were not diagnosed with cancer. At the time of blood sample collection, eight of these 52 participants scored positively on a multicancer early detection (MCED) laboratory test. All eight were diagnosed within four months following blood collection. For six of the eight individuals, investigators also were able to assess additional blood samples collected 3.1–3.5 years prior to diagnosis, and in four of these cases, tumor-derived mutations could also be identified in samples taken at the earlier timepoint. MCED tests “This study shows the promise of MCED tests in detecting cancers very early, and sets the benchmark sensitivities required for their success,” says Bert Vogelstein, M.D., Clayton Professor of Oncology, co-director of the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins and a senior author on the study. Detecting cancers years before their clinical diagnosis “Detecting cancers years before their clinical diagnosis could help provide management with a more favorable outcome,” adds Nickolas Papadopoulos, Ph.D., professor of oncology, Ludwig Center investigator and senior author of the study. “Of course, we need to determine the appropriate clinical follow-up after a positive test for such cancers.” The study was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grant #s R21NS113016, RA37CA230400, U01CA230691, P30 CA 06973, DRP 80057309, and U01 CA164975. Additional funding was provided by the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research, the Commonwealth Fund, the Thomas M Hohman Memorial Cancer Research Fund, The Sol Goldman Sequencing Facility at Johns Hopkins, The Conrad R. Hilton Foundation, the Benjamin Baker Endowment, Swim Across America, Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists, Conquer Cancer – Fred J. Ansfield, MD, Endowed Young Investigator Award, and The V Foundation for Cancer Research. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under contract numbers 75N92022D00001, 75N92022D00002, 75N92022D00003, 75N92022D00004, and 75N92022D00005. To read the original article click here.

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New Startup Is Training Labradors to Detect Cancer

AHA Publisher — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 07:00:48 +0000

Abigail Klein Leichman via Israel21c – Few people better understand a dog’s psyche and capabilities than Col. (Res.) Ariel Ben-Dayan, former commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Oketz canine unit. Ben-Dayan is CEO of SpotitEarly, which is building an early cancer detection system based on dogs’ superior sense of smell combined with artificial intelligence. The user will purchase a home kit containing a surgical mask, breath into the mask for five minutes and then send it to a screening lab where the mask is inserted into a sniffing station. Several specially trained dogs will sniff the sample. Few people better understand a dog’s psyche and capabilities than Col. (Res.) Ariel Ben-Dayan, former commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Oketz canine unit. Ben-Dayan is CEO of SpotitEarly, which is building an early cancer detection system based on dogs’ superior sense of smell combined with artificial intelligence. The user will purchase a home kit containing a surgical mask, breath into the mask for five minutes and then send it to a screening lab where the mask is inserted into a sniffing station. Several specially trained dogs will sniff the sample. The company’s lab is on a kibbutz, where the dogs live and work. SpotitEarly is conducting clinical trials with two Israeli medical centers, Hadassah in Jerusalem and Sourasky in Tel Aviv. “During the pre-trial training phase, our test showed higher sensitivity and better specificity in detecting early stages of cancer compared to any existing test on the market today,” says Ben-Dayan. “We expect interim analysis in three months and will finish clinical trials in 10 months.” Dog and Nanotechnology Hybrid Scent technology is a hot new frontier, and there are disease-sniffing electronic “noses” being developed at Ben-Gurion University and at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. However, e-noses have not yet proved accurate enough in real-world conditions where it’s necessary to isolate disease odors from other scents in a sample – such as coffee on the patient’s breath. Ben-Dayan believes the future lies in a hybrid electronic nose and dog nose. “I have many years of experience with dogs, and I know that no one can replace a dog nose. But when you add technology, this will be the optimal system to give us another level of confidence and verification,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “If we find cancer, we will then send our customer for additional screening procedures. If those scans don’t find anything [yet] because it’s too early stage, we will recommend routine screenings every six or 12 months, since we assume there are cases where we’ll find it before any other lab,” Ben-Dayan says. He and his cofounders — Roi Ophir, Udi Bobrovsky and Ohad Sharon — recently added three PhDs to their team, one an expert in data science, one in animal behavior and the other a clinical lab manager. They have high hopes that eventually their canine and AI system could screen for multiple types of cancer. Scalability But is it possible to scale a business based on live animals? Ben-Dayan believes the kits make it doable. And judging by the $6.2 million seed round SpotitEarly recently raised, investors such as Hanaco Ventures also believe the idea is feasible. Ben-Dayan tells ISRAEL21c that one lab could perform a million tests annually. “We are building an automatic lab so operational efforts will be minimal. The dogs will be able to check hundreds of screening kits in an hour,” says Ben-Dayan, emphasizing that this task is like a fun game for them. He envisions each SpotitEarly lab situated in a dog-friendly setting where the canines would live on premises and have “the best lodgings, food, veterinary care, love and care possible” as they do at the test lab in Israel. Though he and his staff are dog lovers, he says, the company is founded on their concern for human life. Given that many people are reluctant to go for tests such as mammography and colonoscopy, this is an easy, relatively inexpensive alternative people could perform at home. “Our mission is increasing the number of people who do screening tests,” says Ben-Dayna. “I’ll be very happy to sell a million kits so we can save the lives of 5,000 people – that’s the number we estimate according to statistics.” If their behavior, confirmed by an AI algorithm, indicates that cancer is detected, the person will be referred to the medical system for further testing. According to the American Kennel Club, dogs’ ultrasensitive noses can detect the odor of cancer in breath or urine at a very early stage, when the disease is far more treatable. SpotitEarly trains Labradors to sniff out breast, lung, colon or prostate cancer reliably from one sample. Ben-Dayan says this breed has the right set of traits: excellent smelling capability, discipline and passion to work. To read the original article click here.

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Researchers to Develop New Technology to Detect and Remove Cancer Tumors

AHA Publisher — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 07:00:21 +0000

University of Warwick via News-Medical – New technology that will marry probes that can detect cancer tumors through the skin with high-precision robotic surgery is to be developed for use in hospital settings for the first time in a project led by the University of Warwick. The Terabotics project will use probes that use terahertz radiation, or T-rays, to scan for tumors under the skin while medical-grade surgical robots will be adapted to use these scans to guide them in removing tumors in skin and colorectal cancer patients more precisely. If successful, the researchers hope it could lead to real-time diagnosis for cancer patients, shorter waiting periods for cancer surgery, and more comprehensive removal of tumors with reduced need for follow-up surgery. The project, which has received funding of £8 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, is a collaboration between the University of Warwick, University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire, University of Leeds and the University of Exeter. The five-year project starting in September 2021 aims to eventually trial the technology with patients attending cancer services at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Terabotics will use research from the University of Warwick into terahertz (THz) radiation, or T-rays, which sit in-between infrared and WiFi on the electromagnetic spectrum. Previous work from the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics has shown that these can be used to detect very subtle changes in the outermost layers of skin, and the technique has already been demonstrated on healthy volunteers. This will be the first time that it will be studied in patients within an active cancer process. As well as assessing how effective T-ray technology is in diagnosing cancers compared to standard care, the project aims to incorporate the technology into surgical robots to guide them more accurately when detecting tumors during colonoscopy and removing them during surgery. “What we will be testing is our hypothesis that we are able to detect a buried or hidden tumor. We think our terahertz probe will be able to detect those through looking at the transient response of the skin.” Emma Pickwell-MacPherson, Professor and Principal Investigator, Department of Physics, University of Warwick “Somebody might already be diagnosed with cancer but the actual extent of that cancer may not be known. For example, in skin cancer patients, the THz probe will image the visible tumor and the surrounding area to better determine the extent of the tumor that is beneath the surface. This will enable the whole tumor to be removed in one go, rather than incrementally. In turn, this enables better planning for reconstruction and speeds up the procedure.” Initially, the researchers will focus on adapting the T-ray probes to work with the surgical robots, miniaturisation of the technology and refining the design to provide more diagnostic parameters. Later stages of the project will involve trialling the technology with patients with a known or suspected cancer. Those attending cancer services at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire will be offered the opportunity to participate alongside their routine care. Colorectal cancer patients will be seen at the University of Leeds, where an endoscopic probe is being developed specifically to examine the colon. Just like our skin, the colon is an epithelial lining and could potentially be scanned by T-rays in the same way. At present, diagnosis of skin cancer relies upon a visual inspection by a clinician and a biopsy. There are over 150,000 new cases of skin cancer in the UK each year (1) and two to three million globally (2), numbers which are set to rise due to increased life expectancy. 1 in 15 UK males and 1 in 18 UK females will be diagnosed with bowel cancer in their lifetime and it is the second most common cause of cancer death in the UK. (2) Professor Joseph Hardwicke, Medical Lead for the project at University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire, said: “This technique is a way to examine the skin at a deeper and more technical level than what we are able to at the moment. The main hope, especially for skin cancer, is to determine the extent of the spread locally and also to potentially diagnose these cancers without the need for a biopsy in future. “This is a whole new area of diagnostics, like how MRI in the 1980s revolutionised medical imaging. I think this is a chance for terahertz combined with robotics to give us that greater accuracy. Even though we are still building evidence, there seems to be a lot of pieces of the jigsaw that make logical sense.” Professor Pickwell-MacPherson adds: “If we can give a quantitative answer using our technology that would be great, and ultimately that will speed up the throughput of patients. That in turn will reduce waiting times and costs, it will mean that the surgical procedures can be better planned and done more efficiently, the number of follow-up procedures can be reduced, then that has implications financially to the NHS. “This area is up and coming and terahertz robotics is becoming a hot topic. It has long been suggested that THz technology could be used for cancer detection and this project will push the technology forward to make it a reality. We hope that by demonstrating its application to skin and colon cancers we will open up the door to applying the technology to benefit other cancers too and transform cancer treatment protocols.” Professor Pietro Valdastri of the University of Leeds said: “Robotics is increasingly used in the operating theatre as it brings superior accuracy and unload some of the burden of the procedure from the surgeon. At Leeds, we are developing the next generation of surgical robots to detect colorectal cancer earlier and remove it more effectively. Adding THz perception capabilities to our robots is a new exciting avenue of research that has the potential to improve cancer patient quality of life in the next 5 to 10 years.” The project is among 20 innovative projects announced to revolutionise healthcare, improve treatments for millions of people with a wide range of conditions and save the NHS money. The projects are supported by £30.8 million of funding by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Four projects were co-funded by UKRI’s Medical Research Council (MRC). EPSRC Executive Chair Professor Dame Lynn Gladden said: “Technologies and approaches pioneered by UK researchers have the potential to revolutionise treatment for a wide range of conditions, from bowel cancer to diabetes. “The projects announced today exemplify this potential and may play a key role in improving the lives of millions of people.” To read the original article click here.

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Skin Cancer Diagnosis Is About to Undergo a Revolution

AHA Publisher — Tue, 04 May 2021 07:00:20 +0000

Abigail Klein Leichman via Israel21c – When Ofir Aharon was finishing his PhD in electro-optics engineering, his mother was diagnosed with melanoma, a serious form of skin cancer. He decided to channel his knowledge into inventing a potentially lifesaving device that could detect unique patterns of light movements in the skin before visible signs such as changes in pigmentation show up on the surface. “Physicians say 50 percent of skin cancer starts out ‘innocent’ and then becomes cancer, but pathologists familiar with tissue structure say 95% of lesions that look innocent already started as cancer. I wondered why there was no tool that could show the early deterioration of lesions well before they became pigmented,” Aharon tells ISRAEL21c. Aharon’s revolutionary discovery is that the movement of light scattering back to the imaging camera from a cancerous lesion looks much different than from a benign lesion. “In skin cancer we see a lot of lateral movement, mainly circular. If the lesion is normal, or if there is no lesion on the skin, this lateral movement looks random, with no prominent movements and thus no directional patterns. But in skin cancer the movement of the backscattered light goes from the middle outward or circles the middle of the lesion.” Aharon established Patternox to develop and commercialize his PatScope scanner, powered by an algorithm that extracts rotational movements from the scan. The product’s technical description is “a multifunctional device for imaging surface/volume irregularities on a skin lesion by shadow gradient pattern imaging.” Having filed a US patent application in early 2020, Patternox will launch a seed round in July with hopes of having PatScope FDA approved and commercialized in about two years. Aharon envisions a unique artificial intelligence (AI) system and reimbursement strategy so patients will be able to perform the scan at home with virtual assistance from their dermatologist. ‘Something We’ve Never Looked at Before’ Florida-based dermatologist Dr. Barry Galitzer is performing clinical trials using a PatScope prototype. “About a year ago, I read an article about Ofir’s technology to test for melanoma in advance, and I contacted him because I was excited about this,” Galitzer tells ISRAEL21c. “It’s a new concept enabling us to see something we’ve never looked at before.” Since December 2020, Galitzer has built a database of almost 200 scanned images. Each lesion is then biopsied and studied under a microscope to compare histological findings with the PatScope scans. The more he uses the scanner the more easily he can discern what he is seeing, Galitzer says. Once there’s a large enough sample database to learn from, AI could interpret the scanned images. “That is the exciting part,” he says. “AI would be incredible in giving us the answers we need.” This technology could reduce unnecessary biopsies, Galitzer adds. “We could evaluate the spot and immediately see if it has signs of abnormality and then take a biopsy to confirm that suspicion.” Another study will begin soon under the direction of plastic surgeons Yoram Wolf and Ofer Arnon at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera. Arnon is medical director of Patternox. Checking Astronauts for Skin Damage In addition to detecting skin cancer, the PatScope also could be used to reveal changes in the deeper layers of skin over time, monitoring degradation from, for example, sun damage and aging. The first place this application may be trialed is in outer space. “It is known that astronauts experience accelerated aging in space. One of the main reasons is the change in blood flow, which first affects the papillary layer under the epidermis,” says Aharon. “The method developed by Patternox would help astronauts monitor the behavior of their biggest organ — the skin — as an indicator of their exposure to microgravity, radiation dose, and stress during their missions in the International Space Station,” he explains. Aharon is seeking private or public investment to pursue a proposed collaboration with ICECUBES space application services to send a PatScope to the International Space Station for experimentation. The PatScope also has potential for cosmetic purposes. “For instance, dermatologists and aestheticians could use the scanner to monitor the effects of a prescribed skin cream,” Aharon says. But due to his mom’s history with melanoma, Aharon’s main focus is on detecting skin cancer earlier than ever before possible. “The PatScope shows not just underlying irregularities in patterns of lesions but also why the patterns are considered as a distortion utilizing PatScope’s algorithm analyzing the backscattered light’s lateral movements,” he says. “If we can identify unique characteristics of lateral movements for healthy skin versus skin cancer, we can probably develop artificial intelligence to diagnose skin cancer based on these kinds of movement.” For more information, click here For more information on skin cancer, click here. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Israel21c click here.

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New Technology Detects Breast Cancer Using Tears

AHA Publisher — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 07:00:48 +0000

Kobe University via News-Medical Net – Kobe University and System Instruments Co., Ltd. researchers have developed TearExo®; new technology to detect breast cancer using the exosomes found in tears as biomarkers. Exosomes are a subtype of extracellular vesicles. Research team members included Professor TAKEUCHI Toshifumi (Kobe University Graduate School of Engineering), Project Professor TANINO Hirokazu and Professor SASAKI Ryohei (both of Kobe University Hospital), and Mr HAMADA Kazuyuki (System Instruments Co., Ltd.). This research was mainly conducted by researchers at Kobe University’s Medical Device Fabrication Engineering Center (Director: Professor MUKAI Toshiji). It is hoped that this technology can make a great contribution towards people’s health by enabling prompt cancer detection. This research was first published online on March 10, 2020 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and was featured on the journal cover. Main Points TearExo® uses the world’s first chemical nano-processing technology to detect exosomes in a very small amount of bodily fluid, demonstrating extremely high sensitivity and smooth operability, without the need for pretreatments and detection reagents. TearExo® enables non-invasive breast cancer testing to be conducted using tear fluid samples that can be easily self-collected by the patient. The researchers demonstrated a new liquid biopsy methodology for early cancer detection using the exosomes in tear fluid as biomarkers. This was realized through an ‘automatic exosome analyzer’; a highly sensitive assay to measure exosomes, which enables bodily fluid tests to be conducted quickly and easily. Research Background Currently, imaging-based screening methods such as mammography are used to detect breast cancer. However, these medical devices are often large and it takes time to obtain the results, as at least two specialists need to interpret the images. This imposes a heavy burden on the patient. Recently liquid biopsies, where the extracellular vesicle exosomes found in patients’ bodily fluids are used as biomarkers to detect cancer, have gained attention as a possible alternative. Liquid biopsies are noninvasive and reduce the burden on the patient. It is hoped that they would improve both cancer testing rates and early cancer detection rates. It has been reported that exosomes are involved in cancer metastasis and malignant development. Therefore exosomes are often the target of liquid biopsies as they are considered to be extremely important markers for diagnosing cancer. However, it is difficult to conduct a prompt analysis using regular exosome analysis methods because they require cumbersome preprocessing. If a new, convenient and highly sensitive method for detecting cancer cell-related exosomes in bodily fluids were to be implemented, it would provide an extremely powerful cancer screening method. Research Methodology Principle TearExo® consists of a fluorescent exosome sensing chip and an automatic exosome analyzer. The fluorescent exosome sensing chip was constructed by placing an antibody and a fluorescent reporter molecule in a 100nm nanocavity formed on a glass chip. The antibody recognizes the surface proteins of exosomes and the fluorescent reporter molecule can be used to read the exosomes’ binding with the antibody based on changes in the fluorescence. With the automatic exosome analyzer, the researchers achieved a rapid, ultra-sensitive assay (about 1000 times more sensitive than current immunoassays) capable of detecting 50 exosomes in 100µL of fluid in ten minutes, without the need for the lengthy pretreatment required in the past. Detecting Cancer from Tear Fluid Tear fluid was sampled from breast cancer patients and healthy donors via Schirmer tests, whereby a small strip of filter paper is used to collect the tear fluid. TearExo® was used to measure the exosomes in these tear fluid samples and analyze the pattern of the surface proteins’ composition (principal component analysis). A clear difference was found between the samples obtained from healthy donors and those from breast cancer patients, demonstrating that tear fluid can be used to detect breast cancer. Exosome composition is different before and after mastectomy; after surgery the composition is the same as that found in healthy people. This shows that TearExo® could also be used to check and monitor patients’ post-treatment recovery, as well as for initial cancer detection.For the first time in the world, this research demonstrated that cancer can be detected using tear fluid. Further Research Exosome analysis of clinical samples will be conducted on a larger scale to determine the specificity and sensitivity of this method of breast cancer diagnosis. After that, there are plans to establish a venture company within the next year and apply to Japan’s PMDA (Pharmaceuticals and Medicals Device Agency) for the approval of TearExo® as an in vitro diagnostic device. To read the original article click here.

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Deep-Learning Tech Reveals Personal ID of Cancer Cells

AHA Publisher — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 07:00:36 +0000

Brian Blum via Israel21c – Technion’s computerized pathologist decodes cancer signatures to improve personalized medicine. Just as every handwritten signature is unique, so is every cancerous tumor. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have now used artificial intelligence and big datato decode the unique signatures of certain cancer cells. (The original scan (left) and the areas where information was extracted (in red and green, right) using the technology developed at the Technion. Photo courtesy of Technion Spokesperson Department) The resulting technology – dubbed a “computerized pathologist” –could significantly boost development of personalized cancer treatments. The researchers worked with digital images from breast-cancer biopsy samples. The new technology, described earlier this summer in the medical journal JAMA, extracts molecular information from the cell shape (morphology) and its environment. “Pathologists we spoke to said it was an impossible task,” explained doctoral student Gil Shamai, who worked with Prof. Ron Kimmel of the Technion’s Faculty of Computer Science and fellow doctoral student Ron Slossberg. “A human pathologist cannot infer the tumor features from its shape because of the sheer number of variables. The good news is that artificial intelligence technologies, and especially deep learning, are capable of doing so. The computer, unlike even the most skilled pathologist, can characterize the cancer with a complex analysis of its morphology.” With the help of image processing and AI tools, the researchers predicted the molecular profile of cancerous cells just by looking at the tissue as it appears on standard biopsy scans. “We succeeded in identifying the ‘signature’ that the cancer leaves in the tissue,” Shamai added. The team had to write its own software code to compare the biopsies it was analyzing with samples of more than 20,000 scans from 5,356 breast cancer patients. Such deep learning systems “require a huge amount of information and obtaining the kind of information required is not easy.” The researchers were then able to map estrogen and progesterone receptors along with other molecular biomarkers. The study focused on breast cancer, but the technology will be relevant to all cancers. “This is a feasibility study,” said Kimmel. “In the first phase, we believe it will be a tool to help doctors make decisions and will later be developed as a real clinical tool.” The research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Lorry Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering, and Schmidt Futures. Dr. Yoav Binenbaum of Tel Aviv Medical Center and Prof. Ziv Gil of Rambam Medical Center also participated in developing the technology. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Israel21c click here.

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