Sex-Specific Detection Panels Show High Accuracy for Early-Stage Cancer

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 10, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Sex-specific cancer detection panels comprising 10 proteins show high accuracy for detecting early-stage cancers among men and women, according to a study published online Jan. 9 in BMJ Oncology.

Bogdan Budnik, Ph.D., from Novelna Inc. in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues collected plasma samples from 440 healthy individuals and individuals diagnosed with 18 early-stage solid tumors to develop a novel proteome-based multicancer screening test. More than 3,000 high- and low-abundance proteins in each sample were measured. A limited set of sex-specific proteins that could detect early-stage cancers and their tissue of origin with high accuracy was identified using a multistep statistical approach.

The researchers found that for both men and women, the sex-specific cancer detection panels consisting of 10 proteins showed high accuracy (areas under the curve, 0.98 and 0.983, respectively). The panels were able to identify 93 and 84 percent of cancers among men and women, respectively, at stage I and at a specificity of 99 percent. In more than 80 percent of cases, sex-specific localization panels consisting of 150 proteins could identify the tissue of origin of most cancers. Almost all proteins were found to be in the low-concentration part of the human plasma proteome in an analysis of the plasma concentrations of proteins selected.

"These results provide a foundation for future research and emphasize the potential of proteomic analysis in revolutionizing cancer diagnosis at the population level," the authors write.

The authors disclosed financial ties to Novelna, which funded the study.

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