A landmark study published in the American Association of Cancer Research’s (AACR) prestigious journal ‘Cancer Prevention Research’ has shown that it is possible to identify healthy individuals with higher risk of cancer based on a simple blood draw. The study reports that seemingly normal, asymptomatic middle-aged men and women with no history of cancer but having detectable clusters of Circulating Tumor Cells (abbreviated as ‘C-ETACs’) in their blood have a 230 times higher one year risk of developing cancer as compared to individuals where such clusters were undetectable in blood samples.
In this multi-institutional international collaborative study led by Datar Cancer Genetics, the investigators screened more than 10,000 asymptomatic individuals for detection of C-ETACs and subsequently followed up on these individuals over a period of one year….