Doctors could one day diagnose and characterize early stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC) with a simple blood test thanks to a transatlantic study led by CRUK Manchester Institute Cancer Biomarker Center researchers at the University of Manchester with a team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York published in Nature Cancer.

The study focused on a new sensitive blood test to detect, characterize and monitor small cell lung cancer (SCLC), the most aggressive form of lung cancer.

SCLC is a fast-growing type of cancer that can rapidly spread to other parts of the body through a process called metastasis. Most small SCLC patients, representing 10–15% of all lung cancer cases, are diagnosed late with advanced metastatic disease and few survive beyond 1 to 2 years. However, of the minority of patients with SCLC who are diagnosed very early and have surgery, 6 out of 10 can live for 5 years or more.

The research team developed a new method to analyze blood samples and pick up specific DNA modifications called methylation that change early on in the growth of cancers. The team also developed a sophisticated computational method to assess which methylation modifications were present.

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