New blood test can detect wide range of cancers

A new blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer with high accuracy has been developed by an international team of researchers co-led by UCL. It is expected that the study , published in Annals of Oncology , will play a key role in early detection of cancer, which can often be critical to successful treatment. The test, developed by GRAIL, looks for tell-tale chemical changes to bits of genetic code - cell-free DNA - that leak from tumours into the bloodstream. Researchers from UCL, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School and The Francis Crick Institute, tested more than 4,000 samples from patients - some with and some without cancer. The test was developed using artificial intelligence. Researchers fed data on methylation patterns from blood samples belonging to thousands of cancer patients into a machine learning algorithm. Using this information, the system sorted the samples into groups based on the methylation patterns.