The Congress of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) is taking place these days in Paris and highlighted research that is presented as a pioneer early diagnosis when up to 50 cancer diseases are detected.

Cancer research is not over, and so it should be for what it is considered to be leading cause of death in the developed world. Until a “cure” is discovered, improving treatment and detection takes up most of the research. The one, conducted by oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, bases its results on a simple blood test that detects circulating tumor DNA even when there are no symptoms of the disease.

The test was carried out on 6,621 people over the age of 50 (with no previous cancer diagnosis and no symptoms) who received negative results in 98.6 samples. The researchers point to an “excellent rate” that would demonstrate the test’s ability to rule out tumors. Of the 1.4% of positive results, only 38% were subsequently confirmed by standard methods.

It is clear that there is still a lack of research in this area and this can come with the improvement of the test itself to avoid false positive results, but at the same time with a high degree of capture of patients without the disease and what this type of test can mean stands out especially for some tumors, such as is the pancreas, small intestine or stomach, for which there are no mass screening methods in the population yet.

Early detection is key in cancer and in some of them they are the ones who separate life from death. Therefore, it is important to improve this type of test that looks for the presence of tumor DNA in the bloodstream. This method, non-invasive and very simple to implement by health systems on a large part of the population, will open a new era of eliminating the presence of the disease and improving cancer mortality, according to them.

And advances in treatment?

Although the previous method is important for improving detection, it is clear that it will not prevent the incidence, and tens of millions of patients and others not yet diagnosed must be treated right now. The most interesting short-term treatments continue to be those that seek to improve upon chemical therapies “cutting” the DNA of cancer cellsinhibits the growth of tumors and leaves healthy cells safe, a great worker in chemotherapy.

There has already been encouraging research in mice targeting two of the deadliest cancers. Metastatic ovarian cancer and super-aggressive glioblastoma brain cancer, one of the cancers with the lowest survival rates once detected. The method is based on CRISPR genome editing technology and uses a protein that acts like scissors and a small guide RNA that tells it where to act.

The advantage is huge because there are no secondary effects or what is the same, keeps healthy cells safe. In addition, it prevents the reactivation of cancer cells. It is there that research is headed to treat the disease of our time.