Top South cancer doctor welcomes 'exciting' research breakthrough

One of the South's top cancer doctors has welcomed a discovery that could see people warned of cancer years before diagnosis.

Scientists have found proteins in the blood can be linked to 19 types of cancer, including bowel, prostate and breast cancers.

Dr Richard Roope, from Wessex Cancer Alliance says it's exciting.

He said: "It's in its very early days, but has the potential to be really exciting because what we know is that if you can diagnose cancer early as an early stage, the chances of having good outcomes from treatments are way, way higher."

There's hope that this discovery can be used to detect cancer sooner than we currently can, meaning the disease can be treated sooner, or even prevented.

Researchers found 107 of the 618 proteins they found were from people whose blood was collected at least seven years before they were diagnosed with cancer.

Dr Roope told us that the knowledge base about these blood proteins is growing every month.

"What we know is that, where human cells sort of change into cancer cells, their whole metabolism changes slightly, and they then generate proteins that aren't normally there, and it's these proteins that may be a clue to diagnosing cancers earlier."

He added that while it's exciting news, the research still needs to develop.

"What we don't know, and this is where the research will pan out over the next few years is whether these markers we can find in the Bloods are actually precancerous, so that we can then intervene, perhaps with medication, perhaps with just lifestyle modification to reverse the process."

How scientists made their discovery

Researchers carried out two studies, which were funded by Cancer Research UK.

In the first study, scientists analysed blood samples from UK Biobank taken from more than 44,000 people, including 4,900 who subsequently had a cancer diagnosis.

They used proteomics - the study of proteins to help learn how cancer develops and spreads - to analyse a set of 1,463 proteins from a single sample of blood from each person.

They compared the proteins of people who were later diagnosed with cancer and others who were not, allowing them to identify differences and establish which were linked to cancer risk.

The scientists also identified 182 proteins that differed in the blood three years before a cancer diagnosis.

In the second study, the researchers looked at genetic data from more than 300,000 cancer cases to analyse which blood proteins were involved in cancer development and could be targeted by new treatments.

Some 40 proteins in the blood were found to influence someone's risk of getting nine different types of cancer: bladder, breast, endometrium, head and neck, lung, ovary, pancreas, kidney and malignant non-melanoma.

Scientists say more research is needed to find out exactly what role the proteins play in the development of cancer, which are the most reliable to test for, creating tests for them and drugs to target the proteins.

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