This new blood test can detect cancer 10 years earlier
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is responsible for approximately 70% of head and neck cancers in the United States, making it the leading HPV-associated cancer that continues to rise in recurrence each year. Unlike cervical cancer, which can be detected through routine screening, there is currently no test that can identify HPV-related head and neck cancers before symptoms appear. As a result, most patients are diagnosed only after the tumor has expanded to billions of cells, often spreading to nearby lymph nodes and causing noticeable symptoms. Finding a way to detect these cancers early may allow for prompt treatment and better outcomes.
A new federally funded study published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute Researchers at Mass General Brigham offer promising progress. The team developed a liquid biopsy test called HPV-DeepSeek, which can identify HPV-related head and neck cancers up to 10 years before symptoms begin. The researchers stated that detecting the disease early can increase the chances of successful treatment and reduce the need for aggressive treatments.
“Our study shows for the first time that we can accurately detect HPV-related cancers in asymptomatic individuals many years before they are diagnosed with cancer,” said lead study author Daniel L. Faden, MD, FACS, is a head and neck surgical oncologist and principal investigator at the Mike Toth Center for Head and Neck Cancer Research at Mass I&A, a member of the Mass General Brigham Health Care System. “By the time patients enter our clinics with cancer symptoms, they require treatments that cause significant lifelong side effects. We hope that tools like HPV-DeepSeek will allow us to detect these cancers in their earliest stages, which may ultimately improve patient outcomes and quality of life.”
HPV-DeepSeek works by using whole genome sequencing to identify trace parts of HPV DNA that have broken off from the tumor and entered the bloodstream. Previous research by this team has shown that the test can reach 99% specificity and 99% sensitivity in detecting cancer at its initial clinical presentation, outperforming all current diagnostic methods.
To explore whether HPV-DeepSeek can identify these cancers long before symptoms appear, the researchers analyzed 56 blood samples from the Mass General Brigham Biobank. The samples included 28 people who later developed HPV-related head and neck cancer and 28 healthy individuals who served as a control group.
HPV-DeepSeek detected HPV tumor DNA in 22 out of 28 blood samples from patients who later developed cancer, while all 28 control samples were negative, suggesting the test is highly specific. The test was better able to detect HPV DNA in blood samples collected closer to when patients were diagnosed, with the earliest positive result being in a blood sample collected 7.8 years before diagnosis.
Using machine learning, the researchers were able to improve the power of the test so that it accurately identified 27 out of 28 cancer cases, including samples collected 10 years before diagnosis.
The authors are now validating these findings in a second blinded study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) using hundreds of samples collected as part of the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial at the National Cancer Institute.
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