Slashdot Mirror
A Cheap and Easy Blood Test Could Catch Cancer Early (technologyreview.com)
A simple-to-take test that tells if you have a tumor lurking, and even where it is in your body, is a lot closer to reality -- and may cost only $500. From a report: The new test, developed at Johns Hopkins University, looks for signs of eight common types of cancer. It requires only a blood sample and may prove inexpensive enough for doctors to give during a routine physical. "The idea is this test would make its way into the public and we could set up screening centers," says Nickolas Papadopoulos, one of the Johns Hopkins researchers behind the test. "That's why it has to be cheap and noninvasive." Although the test isn't commercially available yet, it will be used to screen 50,000 retirement-age women with no history of cancer as part of a $50 million, five-year study with the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, a spokesperson with the insurer said. The test, detailed today in the journal Science, could be a major advance for "liquid biopsy" technology, which aims to detect cancer in the blood before a person feels sick or notices a lump. That's useful because early-stage cancer that hasn't spread can often be cured.
$500 a pop to be able to blacklist before the they any Cancer care is cheap to all health planes
Let's hope it doesn't cost $1Million/test.
yea, if youre in europe
here we will have to pay 2,000 after insurance
so we can subsidize the rest of the world as usual
That's pretty high for a test with a less-than-stellar detection rate (roughly 2/3 false negative for breast cancer and 1/3 false negative for pancreatic cancer).
My (statistically uninformed) gut says you're going to get a lot more extremely anxious people worse off from false positives than you're going to save with early diagnosis.
Hopefully it can be improved - both in accuracy and cost - because I'd gladly give a vial of blood to a lab every year for an 'all-clear'. I just don't see this as being a good option yet.
With the amount of profit surrounding cancer treatments, this tends to be a perfect weapon for corrupt business practices. I wouldn't be surprised if we magically start detecting cancer far more than the average after this test becomes part of a routine annual physical.
Take a good hard look at cancer drug revenue patterns over the last five years. Take a look at the mark-ups, and the out-of-pocket costs. It's fucking obscene.
You want to detect and cure the real disease? Cure the strains of greed that bring forth corruption.
While I'll agree that it's not very invasive, I can't see how anyone can actually claim it is non-invasive unless they have a way of getting your blood without actually having to penetrate your skin.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
subject says it all.
that's the problem with healthcare in general---people don't care (since they get it either via insurance or medicaid), providers don't care (they get paid either way), the insurers don't care (they just raise the premiums, or "uh, oh, medicaid cannot run out of money")... it's a win-win for drug companies. They might as well sell it for $5000, and say "oh, this is dirt cheap... it could save YOUR LIFE! Isn't YOUR LIFE worth someone else paying $5k?"
... now is a method to cure cancer early.
Currently insurance is guaranteed-issue in the US, and treating early-stage cancers is easier/cheaper than catching them late. So yeah, this will save money, and not by blacklisting.
Also, $500 is cheaper than tests for cancer like scopes and CAT scans.
Cancer is way too profitable for their medical cartel. We read about great new treatments several times a month, but notice how they never let us have them.
There's a hypothesis being developed that states that actually cancer is a lot more common than people might think, it's just that the immune system detects it and rejects most (maybe the vast majority?) of cancers before they become a clinically noticeable issue.
If suddenly we start catching cancers so early and start treatment, we might end up treating a lot of cancers that would have got destroyed by the immune system, thus possibly damaging folks far more with exposure to chemotherapy and unnecessary surgery.
I do think this theory has some basis in fact: once I had a growth on my face that I became certain was a basal cell carcinoma, the least dangerous form of skin cancer. However, before I managed to get medical attention on it, this growth got irritated, bled a little bit, and completely disappeared without even a scar. Standard treatment would have left a scar, so seemingly I was better off without any treatment.
we hardly knew ye... probaly....
Currently insurance is guaranteed-issue in the US, and treating early-stage cancers is easier/cheaper than catching them late. So yeah, this will save money, and not by blacklisting.
Also, $500 is cheaper than tests for cancer like scopes and CAT scans.
Talking to a researcher at Tufts, he pointed out that we have plenty of new diagnostics that can't be used because insurance won't cover them. The insurance companies are afraid that the diagnostic will uncover a condition that has to be treated, which would cost more than letting the condition go until it becomes untreatable and the patient dies quickly.
So even though this test might suggest an earlier treatment that is cheaper, you still have to compare the actuarial value of not doing the test and letting the cancers go until they are discovered by some other method.
We need some sort of game-theory change in how insurance companies operate, so that their goal is better health and not lower costs.
Perhaps penalizing the company for deaths under a certain age (to encourage the company to value life over costs), or something similar.
Simply mandating the test and other legislative directives won't work, because the companies still have the incentive to reduce costs - they will always be pulling in the opposite direction.
We need a way to get the insurance companies to pull in the same direction as their customers, so that they both have the same goals.
That being, better health.
Whether it proves to be economical (or even ethical) depends greatly on the level of false positives, beyond the false positives, the number of results that show cancer but the particular cancer in question is something that would have no real health consequences, how harmful the treatments for the cancers are, and how expensive the treatments for the cancers are. Witness the evolution of thinking surrounding prostate cancer detection and treatment... a lot of lessons were learned there.
That said, I think there are likely to be huge benefits from taking as many measurements as we can, starting as soon as we can, without acting on them and before in many cases we even know how to act on them. To me it's appalling that we aren't all wearing some bracelet that logs everything it can for future scientific study or potential diagnostic utility... both because part of the reason we don't is you can't trust anyone not to misuse or lose custody of data these days, and the other part of the reason is we'd rather spend our money on a few more pixels per inch or a screen that bends around the side of our cell phones.
Both of those reasons disgust me.
(BTW, for those who think as I do, I think this is a pretty friggin significant development. I can hear the rest of you yawning because it has nothing to do with emojis, bitcoin, or downloading copyrighted entertainment material without paying for it.)
Someone had to do it.
> it will be used to screen 50,000 retirement-age women with no history of cancer as part of a $50 million, five-year study
So, no need to test men? They don't get cancer ever ?
Which gender suffer higher number of deaths from cancer? Which gender can prove the results more ?
A robot processes patient blood samples for evaluation with the CancerSEEK test.
Fred Dubs, Johns Hopkins Medical Pathology Photograph
Rewriting Life
A Cheap and Easy Blood Test Could Catch Cancer Early
50,000 healthy people will be screened in an effort to detect hidden tumors.
by Emily Mullin January 18, 2018
A simple-to-take test that tells if you have a tumor lurking, and even where it is in your body, is a lot closer to reality—and may cost only $500.
The new test, developed at Johns Hopkins University, looks for signs of eight common types of cancer. It requires only a blood sample and may prove inexpensive enough for doctors to give during a routine physical.
“The idea is this test would make its way into the public and we could set up screening centers,” says Nickolas Papadopoulos, one of the Johns Hopkins researchers behind the test. “That’s why it has to be cheap and noninvasive.”
Although the test isn’t commercially available yet, it will be used to screen 50,000 retirement-age women with no history of cancer as part of a $50 million, five-year study with the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, a spokesperson with the insurer said.
The test, detailed today in the journal Science, could be a major advance for “liquid biopsy” technology, which aims to detect cancer in the blood before a person feels sick or notices a lump.
That’s useful because early-stage cancer that hasn’t spread can often be cured.
Companies have been pouring money into developing liquid biopsies. One startup, Grail Bio, has raised over $1 billion in pursuit of a single blood test for many cancers.
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For their test, Hopkins researchers looked at blood from 1,005 people with previously diagnosed ovarian, liver, stomach, pancreatic, esophageal, colorectal, lung, or breast cancer.
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Their test searches for a combination of eight cancer proteins as well as 16 cancer-related genetic mutations.
The test was best at finding ovarian cancer, which it detected up to 98 percent of the time. It correctly identified a third of breast cancer cases and about 70 percent of people with pancreatic cancer, which has a particularly grim outlook.
The chance of a false alarm was low: only seven of 812 apparently healthy people turned up positive on the test.
The researchers also trained a machine-learning algorithm to determine the location of a person’s tumor from the blood clues. The algorithm guessed right 83 percent of the time.
“I think we will eventually get to a point where we can detect cancer before it’s otherwise visible,” says Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
He cautions that screening tests can sometimes harm rather than help. That can happen if they set off too many false alarms or if doctors end up treating slow-growing cancers that are not likely to do much harm.
"Also, $500 is cheaper than tests for cancer like scopes and CAT scans."
Not to mention that it will be 50$ in Canada, 5$ in Europe and 0.5$ in India.
HEY!!
It totally works and is really really cool and has nanotechnology!
Sincerely,
The Theranos Lady
But it will cost us $50,000
Bill for my wife's recent MRI (2 lumpectomies + radiation in 2015)
.......... $4804 .. $256 ........... -$3645 .......... -$216
... other adjustments ............ $1198
MRI General
Drug Spec (sedation)
Adj (ins)
Pmt AET RCP
Total due
We'll do this every year for a couple more years, plus mammograms twice a year.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Blood cancer tests are already available and if you don't live in the US they are really cheap: cheaper than $500. THEY ALREADY EXIST. Maybe not this one but many already do for markers.
And if you live in a country with good comprehensive healthcare - not the US unless you are rich - then they are worth getting because you can begin treatment early. Instead of being dead in 6 months because it wasnt detected until final stage get early treatment and add 20 years to your life.
If you get this kind of test in the US and it is positive then you become a dead man walking which no US insurance company will touch.
So glad to live in a shithole country!
"Nothing is so good in this world that the people won't tell you exactly what's wrong with it." - Mark Twain
This is unacceptable we have an industry in place to deal with cancer we can't be cutting corners and putting people out of work.
We have all these meds in place to treat you after we put mustard gas in your veins.
Rockefeller went to a minor expense to set this up for the good of... his people.
I thought it had been determined that routine physicals cause more harm than good by essentially picking up more false positives causing unnecessary surgery and anxiety.
Just saying that there is a lot missing before we can call this 'a good thing'.
Some cancer treatments are only 'safe' if you've got nothing left to lose. What do you do if your doctor says, "The tests show that you have very early onset ___ cancer"?
And how certain is the doctor? FTFA: "The algorithm guessed right 83 percent of the time."
Question: Has the health system has developed protocols to address very advanced warning of cancer?
Answer: No.
Yay! Now you can start worrying sooner about that cancer you might or might not have while getting treatments that will definitely affect your quality of life.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.