Personalized Screening Test for Ovarian Cancer Shows Encouraging Results

Results from The UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening could usher in a new era of cancer screenings, according to research and consulting firm GlobalData’s in Vitro Diagnostics Analyst Dr. Andrew S. Thompson.

Scientists from the University College London (UCL) monitored increases in the levels of a blood-based protein called CA-125 in 46,237 post-menopausal women 50 years of age or older over the course of 14 years.

Doctors typically implement a CA-125 blood test to detect ovarian cancer because high levels of the protein cause tumors to form.

The MD Anderson Cancer Center specifies that this test “is most reliable when it is used to find cancer that has come back after treatment,” adding that solely basing conclusions on the presence of CA-125 isn’t a proper diagnosis because high or low levels of the protein doesn’t always mean a patient has ovarian cancer.

Thompson indicates, though, that UCL researchers were able to correctly identify invasive epithelial ovarian cancer in 86 percent of the test group.

Standard versions of this screening process would have only been able to pinpoint ovarian cancer in less than half of this group, according to The Guardian.

The analyst notes this version of the CA-125 test, contingent upon federal approval, “would differentiate itself from other in vitro screening tests with its personalized nature, as it would be based not on a universal view of a population, but on each individual’s own physiology.”

Furthermore, GlobalData’s research shows high adoption in the top seven leading economies where a blood-based ovarian cancer screening would be worth almost $8 billion per year, elaborating that a government sanctioned test distributed on an annual basis could lead to 130 million women 50 years and older who enroll in the screening process.

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Interest is starting to grow in similar blood-based biopsies, too. Scientists from the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Association found success with analyzing non-small cell lung cancer and B-cell lymphoma.

However, more work needs to be done to efficiently gauge if these blood examinations are the way of the future. Thompson mentions the UCL teams experiment will be delivering one final data analysis later this year to see if their screening technique can find rising levels of CA-125 to detect ovarian cancer at an early stage.

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