New blood test developed to diagnose ovarian cancer

Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to develop a new technique to detect ovarian cancer early and accurately. The team has identified a network of circulating microRNAs - small, non-coding pieces of genetic material - that are associated with risk of ovarian cancer and can be detected from a blood sample. Their findings are published online in eLife. Most women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer when the disease is at an advanced stage, at which point only about a quarter of patients will survive for at least five years. But for women whose cancer is serendipitously picked up at an early stage, survival rates are much higher.