A highly accurate, blood-based pancreatic adenocarcinoma screen has been developed that should be accurate enough to test the general population for this deadly disease.

Earlier detection of pancreatic adenocarcinoma would improve survival outcomes, but most efforts to date have been unsuccessful at identifying a biomarker or biomarker panel that has a high diagnostic sensitivity.

At the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) scientists have come to the conclusion that screening a panel of biomarkers might be effective by embracing the idea that pancreatic adenocarcinoma has vast genetic heterogeneity, meaning no single biomarker exists that is strongly correlated with its diagnosis across the population of people who develop the disease.

Therefore, they decided that any test for pancreatic adenocarcinoma deployed to the general population must have an accuracy of greater than 99%. To see if such levels of accuracy were possible, the investigators measured the levels of nine biomarkers of pancreatic adenocarcinoma in the blood of 117 healthy control participants, 58 participants with chronic pancreatitis and 159 patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma. They used a statistical model, to determine that many of these weak biomarkers present in those patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma had 95% specificity for the disease, but on average, only 32% sensitivity.

Matthew Firpo, PhD, an assistant professor at the Huntsman Cancer Institute (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) said, "Identifying 40 biomarker is reasonable. We believe we can find 40 biomarkers that are weak classifiers of the disease. That means that based on the current understanding of biomarkers that we have, there is hope for developing a panel that would have greater than 99% accuracy." He added that the next step is to identify systematically 40 to 50 biomarkers that have these characteristics giving 32% sensitivity and 95% specificity or better. The study was presented at the Cancer Research's Pancreatic Cancer: Progress and Challenges conference, held June 18-21, 2012, in Lake Tahoe (NV, USA).

Related Links:
University of Utah
Huntsman Cancer Institute