When someone has cancer, they are typically able to identify what type of cancer it is. This is why you often hear people say something like, “My mom had liver cancer, which spread to her kidneys.” Each type of cancer is slightly different, and responds best to different types of treatments.

With this in mind, it makes sense that oncologists want to know where the cancer originated whenever possible. For about 5% of cancer patients, however, it is classified as ‘Cancer of Unknown Primary’ (CUP), which just means that the doctors don’t know what part of the body it started in.

The researchers at the Cancer Research UK National Biomarker Center, located in Manchester, have been working for over 15 years to come up with a test that could help those with CUP find the origin without potentially dangerous procedures, and now that test is undergoing real world testing.

This test uses a simple blood sample to look for biomarkers that come from a given type of tumor. Since blood travels throughout the body, it picks up tiny pieces of material from everywhere it goes, including tumors. While difficult to identify, modern technology can analyze that blood precisely, which can help to find scraps of cancer and determine where it came from.

In addition to being able to help diagnose where a particular cancer originated, it may be able to detect cancer in general far earlier than is currently possible.

The concept behind this type of test has been proven to work, but a challenge that is being worked on now is building up a sufficient database of what types of cancers will look like to be effective.

Professor Caroline Dive is the director of the Cancer Research UK National Biomarker Center, and explained:

“Some CUPs come from original tissues where there’s a very common type of cancer, such as lung cancer or colon cancer. Other CUPs have originated from tumors which are really, really rare. So we’re developing our tests to find what we call the ‘molecular postcode’, which is based on all these molecules that sit on DNA and tell us where the cell originated.”

If this method can be perfected and standardized, the blood test could become a routine part of care for many people. It could even used for those who have not yet had a cancer diagnosis to detect it earlier than previously possible.

She went on:

“If we’ve got 300 lung cancers to build our test on, then when we find a CUP that’s lung, it’s easy to do the mapping and we can say that’s a really robust result. But if it’s some very rare tumor, how many of those tumors can we map so that we can identify them? That’s the challenge we have.”

Adding this type of cancer screening to an annual physical, for example, could detect cancers years earlier than generally happens today, potentially saving many lives.

This would be a revolutionary change in cancer detection.

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