France is developing a test to detect lung cancer using a blood test

What if we could detect lung cancer with a simple blood test? This is the goal of researchers from the Besançon hospital. The first results, which have yet to be confirmed, are encouraging.

This is a test that can facilitate diagnosis, screening and monitoring of patients with lung cancer. In Besançon, Dr. Zohair Selmani explains that he and his colleague Alexis Overs have developed a new method for detecting specific cancer biomarkers.

“Our task was to find markers that could be analyzed in the blood,” the teacher and practitioner in oncology biology at the University Hospital of Besançon explains to BFMTV.

In other words, it is a liquid biopsy analysis. First, the researchers had to identify specific signs of lung cancer. To do this, “data from about 400 patients were analyzed, each with more than 450,000 potential targets,” states a press release from the University Hospital of Besançon.

The researchers then identified six specific markers, three of which they would look for in patients’ blood. “We wanted to use a bioinformatics and artificial intelligence algorithm to select among these 450,000 zones those that were found in all patients,” explains Zohair Selmani.

Traces of a tumor are detected in 95% of cases

The scientists then tried to validate their results, initially in collaboration with the University Hospital of Dijon and the EPIGENExp technical platform at the University of Franche-Comté.

“We tested them on blood samples from about twenty lung cancer patients, who were compared with about twenty healthy donors,” says Zohair Selmani. “For most, if not all, lung cancer patients, we found our targets, whereas in about twenty healthy people we did not find our markers.” In almost 95% of cases, traces of a tumor were found, according to the Besançon University Hospital.

For teams, this minimally invasive blood test can be used, among other things, to perform tests or to facilitate monitoring of patients with cancer.

The specialist gives the example of “a patient who had a computed tomography scan. He has a lesion that is a little questionable, but we can’t go and biopsy the lesion. Well, we’ll take a blood sample and if we find our profile with markers, that means he has a very high chance of getting lung cancer.”

Possible extension of the method to other pathologies.

But it is in the context of patient monitoring that this method could also help patients and doctors, according to the researchers. In this regard, the test is being evaluated in collaboration with the Civic Hospices of Lyon on a group of 70 people, representing 1,000 blood samples. According to Professor Lea Payen Gay, these are patients with lung cancer “at different stages of the disease and after different treatments” (radiation therapy, chemotherapy or immunotherapy).

“The idea of ​​this test is to be able to clearly determine, from a simple blood test, that a patient has a tumor of pulmonary origin (… Then we can repeat the tests over time to do this). to see whether the treatment given to patients is effective (the biomarker must disappear from the patients’ blood), explains BFMTV, professor of molecular tumor biology at the Civic Hospice of Lyon: “More regular monitoring of the patient is very important. less stressful.”

“On the other hand, if the biomarker remains stable or even increases, this indicates that the treatment is of limited effectiveness or is ineffective and that consideration should be given to changing the therapeutic line, discussed at a multidisciplinary consultation meeting,” she adds.

Encouraging results, which have yet to be confirmed at this stage, concern lung cancer, in particular adenocarcinoma (cancer that develops in glandular cells, editor’s note). Researchers are also working on using these tests to detect other pathologies: “their use could be extended to other types of cancer (colon, pancreas, prostate, ovarian),” says Besançon University Hospital.