Scientists develop a blood test to predict how long brain cancer patients will survive

Scientists have developed a blood test that can help predict how a patient with glioblastoma – the aggressive brain cancer that claimed the life of late Senator John McCain – will live. 

The test can detect levels of broken DNA fragments floating around the blood stream. 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that people who have lower levels of the DNA fragments, known as cell-free DNA (cfDNA) had nearly twice as long to live as those with higher levels of the biomarker. 

What’s more, they believe their discovery could help doctors track the many and frequent mutations that drive the progression of glioblastoma and make it so difficult to treat. 

Scientists have developed a blood test that revealed glioblastoma patients with high levels of a biomarker lived half as long after diagnosis as those with lower levels. It also detected previously missed mutations that could helped doctors hone treatments for individual patients

John McCain was diagnosed with glioblastoma – a the most common and deadliest form of brain cancer in adults – in July 2017. 

By August 25 of the following year, the Senator and former presidential candidate had died. 

The average survival time from diagnosis is only 15 to 16 months – and for many patients, it’s much shorter. 

One of the reasons that glioblastoma is so deadly so quickly is that it’s difficult to treat. 

And glioblastoma is difficult for several reasons. 

For one, glioblastoma tumors contain multitudes. Various parts of the disease have very different profiles and are fueled by different genetic mutations, so a treatment that keeps the growth of one portion of the tumor at bay may do nothing for another part – or several parts. 

The disease is often already in its later stages by the time it’s diagnosed and scans of the brain are not particularly good ways of tracking how the disease is spreading and growing. 

The result is that doctors don’t know exactly what to look for or where to look for it and the cancer is often a step or several ahead of their tracking and treatments.   

Amanda Johnson was just 30 years old when doctors gave her 16 months to live.   

If she hadn’t been rushed into surgery at the University of California, Irvine, to remove the massive tumor from her brain, Amanda’s survival time might not have been more than a couple of days, her father, Larry told Fox.  

Even after the operation bought Amanda a little bit of time, her family was devastated by the grim prognosis they received, and the unknowns of her disease are anxiety provoking, to say the least. 

But the new blood test could help answer some of those questions and give doctors the tools to tailor treatments to each patient. 

The research team compared tissue and blood – or liquid – biopsies taken from 42 glioblastoma patients to see what signs might be consistent in the two diagnostic measures and how they might predict survival times. 

The 28 patients who had a lower concentration of cfDNA in their blood before surgery survived an average of 9.5 months without their cancers progressing.

But patients with higher levels of the DNA fragments lived an average of just 4.9 months from when their blood samples were taken. 

Dr Daniela Bota (left) at UC Irvine recruited Amanda Johnson (right), 30, among 700 glioblastoma patients, to get an experimental drug to target the tumor's stem cells. As scientists learn more about the DNA mutations driving the brain cancer, treatments improve

Dr Daniela Bota (left) at UC Irvine recruited Amanda Johnson (right), 30, among 700 glioblastoma patients, to get an experimental drug to target the tumor’s stem cells. As scientists learn more about the DNA mutations driving the brain cancer, treatments improve

When the study authors further analyzed the blood of 20 of their patients, they found that more than half (11) of them had signs in their blood of at least one genetic mutation that could be driving the cancer that hadn’t been detectable in the tissue biopsies. 

‘If liquid biopsy can give us a more comprehensive view of the molecular profile of the tumor, we can potentially pick more effective combinations for each patient,’ said Dr Stephen Bagley, lead study author and a professor at Penn. 

‘If our findings are validated by further studies, it would mean that these patients may be able to get a simple blood test that would give us a more accurate assessment than imaging of whether their disease has progressed or not, as well as more data on the mutations in their tumors.’ 

For the time being, glioblastoma patients are blasted with aggressive radiation and chemotherapy and often have as much of their tumors surgically removed as possible.   

Getting treatment better specified for glioblastoma means racing to get into clinical trials for most patients, including Amanda. 

Her family’s frantic research brought Amanda to the UCI’s Dr Daniela Bota and her 700-person clinical trial for adult patients to undergo treatment with a drug called Marizomib. 

The drug travels into the brain and attacks the stem cells that give rise to the tumor cells. 

After two years of getting infusions of Marizomib three times a month, Amanda’s tumor has shrunken so much visual scans can’t measure it. 

Although its too soon for Dr Bota to use the blood test that the Penn researchers developed, it might someday allow an additional way to verify that Amanda, now 30, is at a lower risk of the cancer coming back, and even help tailor treatment to patients like her.   

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk