Scientists have made a “significant step” towards creating a blood test that detects brain tumours and monitors them in real time.
The new test is over 90% accurate and could be used by general practitioners (GPs) to pick up deadly glioblastomas.
It is also being expanded to include other brain tumours.
At present, diagnosing and treating patients can be complex, requiring MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans and invasive surgical biopsies.
Now, researchers have found that a pair of proteins in the blood help identify tumours with high accuracy and provide insights into how the disease responds to treatment.
The study, led by scientists at Britain’s University of Manchester and involving teams in Denmark, has been published in the medical journal Neuro-oncology Advances.
Patients with glioblastoma were used to check the validity of the blood test during surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
The university’s Brain Tumour Charity chair of translational neuro-oncology Prof Dr Petra Hamerlik, who led the research, said: “Glioblastoma is one of the most devastating cancers we face.
“The lack of reliable tests has been a major barrier to earlier diagnosis and treatment response monitoring.
“What is remarkable about our findings is that, despite these tumours being very different in genetic make-up and constantly evolving, the signal in the blood is stable, robust and highly informative.
“We hope that once validated, this simple blood test may pave the way for earlier diagnosis and more precise monitoring of patients during and after therapy.
“Our dual-marker blood test achieved diagnostic accuracy greater than 90% and continued to perform just as well when the disease returned.
“This opens the door to a future where we can follow the tumour’s behaviour through a simple blood sample, complement brain scans, and potentially recognise when the treatment isn’t working and the cancer returns – all much earlier than is currently possible.”
Britain’s Brain Tumour Charity chief scientific officer Dr Simon Newman said: “Early and accurate diagnosis is absolutely critical for people with brain tumours, yet current tools are limited and often invasive.
“This research therefore marks a significant step towards a simple blood test that could help clinicians detect glioblastoma and monitor how patients are responding to treatment in real time.”
Prof Hamerlik, whose father had glioblastoma, said that people can often see a GP six to eight times before being sent for an MRI for a potential brain tumour.
“The idea with our work is that, if you come more than once with a headache – such as three times – and if the doctor suspects a brain tumour, they would run this test,” she said.
“The risk score would indicate that you might have a malignant growth in your brain and you should go for MRI.
“The idea is to develop a device – something like a Covid test – to start with.
“If this is confirmed, then it will be submitted to regulatory bodies and hopefully brought into the NHS [National Health Service] within a decade.”
Prof Hamerlik said the test is also effective at measuring response to therapy.
“When our patients started treatment after surgery, the biomarkers changed,” she said.
“They went up as the tumour grew back, and then they went down again when people were having chemotherapy.”
The team has launched a clinical trial running at six sites in Britain and four abroad.
Asked about the lack of treatments for glioblastoma, Prof Hamerlik said she wanted to be ready with a simple blood test for when new medicines come on stream.
She added: “Late diagnosis impacts the prognosis of the patients.
“The later, the bigger the lesion, the worse the outcome.
“Even with surgery, if the tumours are picked up early and they’re smaller, you have less damage to the normal brain.” – PA Media/dpa
