According to research, proteins in the blood could warn people early hand, almost seven years before diagnosis. Two studies were conducted.

Scientists at the Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford conducted these studies.

In the first study, researchers studied blood samples of 44,645 participants aged between 39 and 73, in the UK Biobank, including more than 4,900 people who subsequently had a cancer diagnosis.

They compared and found the difference in blood proteins of people who were and were not diagnosed with cancer using a powerful technique i.e. proteomics and identified 618 proteins linked to up to 19 types of cancer, including colon, lung, liver, kidney, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The study has been published in Nature Communications and was funded by Cancer Research UK. It also identified 371 plasma protein markers of cancer risk including 107 which were associated with cancer diagnosis more than seven years after blood was collected from people. Furthermore, 182 proteins were strongly associated with diagnosis within three years. This suggests potential relevance as biomarkers for early detection.

The authors concluded that further research was needed but these proteins could truly benefit us in early cancer detection and can also help us find better treatments in the future.

Dr Keren Papier, a senior nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health at the University of Oxford and joint first author of the study said that it's important to understand the fundamentals of cancer disease at an early stage and how the proteins in our blood are linked to cancer. This will help us save more lives. The next step for them is to study these proteins in detail to see which is reliable and can be used for cancer prevention.

Since these proteins could be involved in early cancer detection, researching more on them could help us find a way to halt these diseases altogether.

In the second study, scientists looked at genetic data from over 3,00,000 cancer cases to dig deeper into which proteins in the blood are associated with cancer prevention and could be targeted by new treatments. They investigated 2074 circulating proteins and the risk of nine common cancers which are bladder, breast, endometrium, head and neck, lung, ovary, pancreas, kidney, and malignant non-melanoma.

Additional analyses were conducted to identify a few adverse side effects. They found 40 proteins in the blood that influence someone's risk of getting any of the nine cancer types mentioned above. Altering these proteins can increase or decrease the chances of cancer development but more research might be needed to identify unwanted side effects that might take place if targeted drugs are used for cancer prevention.

This research brings us closer to what was once thought to be impossible but now seems attainable and that is cancer prevention with targeted drugs says Dr Karl Smith-Byrne, Senior Molecular Epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health, who worked on both papers. 

References:

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48017-6

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46834-3#Sec16

(Input from various sources)

(Rehash/Aditi Madathingal/MSM)