Could we soon be able to detect cancer in 10 minutes?
The Guardian - Back to home The Observer Cancer research Could we soon be able to detect cancer in 10 minutes? Pioneering methods are being developed to find traces of tumours quickly in small blood samples Zoë Corbyn Sun 24 Feb 2019 09.00 GMT Shares 376 Comments 92 Cancer diagnosis using blood tests would be earlier and less invasive. Photograph: Zoonar GmbH//Alamy A bout seven years ago, researchers at the US DNA sequencing company Illumina started to notice something odd. A new blood test it ran on 125,000 expectant mothers looking for genetic abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome in their foetuses returned some extremely unexpected signals in 10 cases. Chillingly, it dawned on them that the abnormal DNA they were seeing wasn’t from the foetuses but was, rather, undiagnosed cancer in the mothers. Cancers of different types were later confirmed in all 10. “This was not a test dev...