[The Epoch Times, March 28, 2022](The Epoch Times reporter Li Shaowei compiled and reported) Pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate, and it is almost asymptomatic in the early stage, so it is difficult to detect. A new method developed by a study can detect up to 95 percent of stage 1 pancreatic cancers.
The researchers used a method called high-conductance di-electrophoresis to detect tumor proteins released by cancer cells in extracellular vesicles to determine the presence of tumors. Dielectrophoresis is a phenomenon in which a dielectric is stressed in a non-uniform electric field. These protein signature data are then analyzed using artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood of malignancy in the body.
This study conducted the first round of clinical testing experiments. 139 patients with stage 1 and 2 cancer, as well as 184 non-patients, participated in the survey to see the accuracy of the new method’s screening.
The results showed that this method was able to detect 99.5% of patients with stage 1 pancreatic cancer, 74.4% of patients with stage 1 ovarian cancer, and 73.1% of patients with pathological stage 1A invasive serous ovarian adenocarcinoma. The specificity (also known as the true negative rate) exceeds 99%. Specificity is a statistical term that means the proportion of samples that are judged to be negative among samples that are actually negative. This means that the proportion of non-cancer patients judged to be non-cancer exceeds 99%.
From these data, this method has good potential value for diagnosing early-stage cancer.
“The results of this approach to early-stage pancreatic cancer look promising,” said co-author Scott M. Lippman, director of the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. Especially good. It’s more than five times more accurate than liquid biopsies now used to detect early-stage cancers of all types.”
Lippman said that liquid biopsy is more suitable for monitoring the condition during treatment and checking whether the disease has recurred, and it is not a good method for detecting early-stage cancer. “This can be harmful to otherwise healthy people because the rate of false-positive results is too high, leading to a variety of diagnostic tests that are expensive and often risky.”
Early detection of cancer is important, Lippman said, because cancers like cervical, breast, colon and rectal cancers have a high chance of being cured if detected early. However, currently, only 5% of pancreatic cancers are found in the first stage, and only 10% of patients have time to receive effective surgical treatment.
In 2020, 46,774 Americans died from pancreatic cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pancreatic cancer was the third leading cause of death in Americans that year.
“Pancreatic cancer has the lowest five-year survival rate of all cancer types, and is the only one with increasing morbidity and mortality,” said co-investigator Andrew Lowy, clinical director of the Moore Cancer Center. cancer.”
“Pancreatic cancer is very difficult to detect in the early stages, which is the best time for surgery, and early surgery is the only way to treat this cancer. However, pancreatic cancer has almost no symptoms in the early stage.”
Lippmann said that if the test is confirmed by large-scale clinical trials, it will be a good way to detect early pancreatic cancer, and the mortality rate of pancreatic cancer will be greatly reduced.
The study was published March 17 in the journal Nature Communications Medicine. ◇
Responsible editor: Ye Ziwei
