Research conducted at the University of Oxford suggests that proteins present in the bloodstream might serve as early indicators of cancer, potentially detecting the disease more than seven years prior to diagnosis.
The study, which analysed blood samples from over 44,000 individuals enrolled in the UK Biobank, observed a subset of over 4,900 participants who later received a cancer diagnosis.
In their study, researchers compared the protein profiles of individuals who later developed cancer with those who did not, pinpointing 618 proteins correlated with 19 different types of cancer, such as colon, lung, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and liver cancer.
Sponsored by Cancer Research UK and published in Nature Communications, the study further identified 107 proteins linked to cancers diagnosed over seven years after blood sample collection, along with 182 proteins strongly linked to a cancer diagnosis within three years.
The authors concluded that some of these proteins could be used to detect cancer much earlier and potentially provide new treatment options, though further research was needed.
Dr Keren Papier, a senior nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health at the University of Oxford and joint first author of the study, said: “To save more lives from cancer, we need to better understand what happens at the earliest stages of the disease … [and] how the proteins in our blood can affect our risk of cancer. Now we need to study these proteins in depth to see which ones could be reliably used for prevention.”
