Breath test to detect cancer: Huge breakthrough to reduce invasive tests
Published on: 3 Sep 2018
The Sunday Express reports on Breath Biopsy and the opportunity it presents to improve healthcare diagnostics by offering non-invasive collection and analysis of patients’ breath.
Breath test to detect cancer: Huge breakthrough to reduce invasive tests
The Sunday Express has reported on Owlstone Medical’s activites around Breath Biopsy and the ongoing LuCID, InTERCEPT and PAN clinical trials.
Article extracts:
By detecting cancer earlier, potentially before symptoms have even appeared, tens of thousands of lives could be saved every year. Multiple large-scale clinical trials, partly funded by the Government, are under way involving thousands of patients.
Although experiments in using breath tests for cancer have been carried out before, researchers say the latest technology is the most sensitive to date, and also the most accurate for picking up early signs of the disease.
Research has started on 4,000 patients to identify lung cancer – most often detected at a late stage when it can be terminal – in a project known as the LuCID trial.
Last month experts at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust started recruiting people to identify breath biomarkers for early detection across a range of other cancers, starting with oesophageal and stomach cancer.
They plan to expand this to include prostate, pancreatic and bladder cancer.
A third study, led by experts at Warwick University and the University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust is recruiting 1,400 trial subjects for the InTERCEPT trial aimed at the early identification of colorectal cancer – currently detected late in 90 per cent of cases.
Research shows early diagnosis can dramatically improve survival rates, with 93 per cent of patients surviving five years following early intervention.
Dr Robert Rintoul, lung cancer specialist at Royal Papworth Hospital, who is running the LuCID breath test trial for lung cancer at 26 sites across the UK and Europe, said: ‘I am very excited about this work. We don’t have a good technique for identifying early stage lung cancer.’
Dr Rintoul added: ‘We hope we will be able to detect cancers with more specificity and more sensitivity than previous tests and the new breath collection mask and microchip are at the heart of this.’
‘Sensitivity and accuracy is the holy grail of cancer diagnostics. Although there have been other breath tests trialled, we hope this new technology will be more sensitive and accurate for detecting early stage disease.’
Breath Biopsy®
If you want to learn more about how Owlstone Medical’s Breath Sampling and Analysis technology and Services are being utilized in early detection and precision medicine, why not download our free ebook: Breath Biopsy: The Complete Guide?
