New Lung cancer test for 99% effective early detection

esearchers at a Gaithersburg, MD, pharmaceutical company say they have found that 99 percent of patients with all stages of lung cancer have detectable levels of a particular protein in their blood that healthy individuals do not. The company, Panacea Pharmaceuticals, is reporting encouraging preliminary results for its test for the protein this week at a conference of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Lung cancer survival rates are as high as 80% for stage 0 lung cancer If all lung cancer was detected early then survival rates would be far higher.

Stage 0 Lung Cancer
The lung cancer is localized
Five-Year Survival Rate = 70 – 80%

Stage I Lung Cancer
The lung cancer is confined to the lungs and surrounded by normal tissue.
Five-Year Survival Rate = 50%

Stage II Lung Cancer
The lung cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes.
Five-Year Survival Rate = 30%

Stage III Lung Cancer
The lung cancer has spread to the chest wall, diaphragm, or other nearby organs or blood vessels.
Five-Year Survival Rate = 5 – 15%

Stage IV Lung Cancer
The lung cancer has spread to more distant sites in the body.
Five-Year Survival Rate = Less than 2%

RELATED NEWS
Genetic screening for breast cancer is making breast cancer testing faster and a lot cheaper

Genetic tests for prostate cancer are also being developed. Doctors hope that it will make diagnosis of the disease more accurate and reduce the number of biopsies (removal of tissue samples) that are obtained through painful procedures.

3 thoughts on “New Lung cancer test for 99% effective early detection”

  1. Supercomputers often need to have the programs that run on them to be highly optimized to take advantage of the speed. $1 million to get 100 teraflops of hardware for running special jobs and then $1 million for the 1 year for a team of Phds to tune your application. That would still be worthwhile. You will probably be running some really big simulation or grand challenge problem. It would bring the technology to reasonably well funded universities.

    Plus like the graphic applications, one could program them to solve a useful common class of problem.

Comments are closed.