AI Blood Test Shown to Detect >90% of Lung Cancers Across Different Stages

A novel artificial intelligence (AI) blood testing technology developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center has been shown to detect over 90% of lung cancers in samples from nearly 800 individuals with and without cancer. The test approach, called DELFI (DNA evaluation of fragments for early interception), spots unique patterns in the fragmentation of DNA that is shed from cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream, or cell free DNA (cfDNA). A study reported in Nature Communications has now demonstrated how testing for fragmentation features, in combination with evaluating clinical risk factors, analyzing a protein biomarker, and CT imaging, enabled detection of 94% of patients with cancer across stages and subtypes. Reporting on the study, senior author Victor E. Velculescu, MD, PhD, first author Dimitrios Mathios, PhD, and colleagues, concluded, "The observations that scalable and cost-effective noninvasive cfDNA fragmentation analyses can discriminate lung cancer patients from noncancer individuals may ultimately provide an opportunity to evaluate not only high-risk individuals but the general population for lung cancer." Their paper is titled, "Detection and characterization of lung cancer using cell-free DNA fragmentomes."