Using these samples (about 200 thousand) the researchers identified the genetic changes that differentiate donors who were subsequently diagnosed with blood cancer 10 or even 20 years after the symptoms of leukemia began, compared to those who did not develop oncological pathologies.
Tumors grow in stages and by identifying those in the early stage you have time to intervene and avoid having to deal with the disease at an advanced stage, when the cancer has already spread.
The second centre, Cancer Research UK at Oxford Population Health, also focuses on predictive blood proteins based on data from participants in the UK Biobank, a prospective cohort of 503,317 adults aged 39 to 73, recruited between 2006 and 2010 from across the UK. In the newly published study, of 1,463 proteins with a risk of up to 19 cancers, researchers identified 371 plasma protein markers of cancer risk, including 107 associated with cancer diagnosed more than seven years after the blood draw.
For example, proteins associated with risk of multiple cancers included GDF15, a stress-regulated hormone that they found to be associated with an increased risk of eight cancers (liver, digestive and gastrointestinal tract, and hematologic malignancies), and MMP12, a enzyme expressed on macrophages that was associated with an increased risk of colon cancer, lung cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
“These studies are important because they provide many new clues into the causes and biology of multiple cancers, including insights into what is happening years before a cancer is diagnosed,” said Ruth Travis, senior molecular epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health and author of the study – We now have technology capable of examining thousands of proteins in thousands of cases of cancer, identifying which of these have a role in the development of specific tumors and which could have effects common to multiple types of cancer.”
