New test method to detect kidney cancers
A novel liquid biopsy method can detect kidney cancers with high accuracy, including small, localized tumors which are often curable but for which no early detection method exists, say scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The report in Nature Medicine suggests that if validated in larger trials and applied widely, the noninvasive test could find more early kidney cancers when they haven’t spread, thus reducing the mortality of the disease. “Hopefully we can scale this to a much larger level and detect cancer earlier so we can act earlier,” said Toni Choueiri, director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology at Dana-Farber and a co-senior author of the study. It is estimated that 73,750 new kidney cancer cases will be diagnosed in 2020, and about 14,830 will die of the disease. About 35 percent of cancers are diagnosed only after they have spread beyond the kidney and are more difficult to treat. Small, early kidney...