Would replace the age-old method of insertion of needles, surgery.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Veracyte, a molecular diagnostics company, has announced the development of a new procedure that could replace the invasive lung biopsies that are prevalent in modern medicine despite being considered unsafe and overly expensive.
Revealed in the New England Journal of Medicine, the “Percepta Bronchial Genomic Classifier,” which was co-developed by researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine, retrieves gene samples from a patient’s windpipe and analyzes 23 of these depending on their reaction to cigarette toxin exposure.
According to The Washington Post, prior to the development of the new procedure, the only ways to access lesions or nodules deep in the small branches of the lungs was to either insert a needle through the chest wall into the tumor or surgically opening a patient’s chest.
The first procedure carries a 15 percent risk of collapsing a lung as well as infection, the newspaper continued. The second is a major surgery that requires general anesthesia and inevitably results in the loss of lung tissue. Furthermore, in about a third of the surgeries, the growth turns out to be benign, making the surgery superfluous.
A needle biopsy has a 15 to 25 percent risk of causing a collapsed lung and surgical biopsy costs more than $20,000, according to Reuters. Veracyte said its lung test would cost between $3,000 and $4,000.
“The only way we can be definitive is to stick a needle through the chest wall or cut open your chest. We don’t want to miss a cancer, so we end up operating on and biopsying a lot of people who don’t have cancer,” explained Dr. Avrum Spira, professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, lead study investigator, and co-inventor of the new test.
“These cells are like a canary in a coal mine. They’re telling us whether that nodule deep down in the lung is likely to be a cancer,” Spira told Reuters, referring to the newfangled procedure.
The Genomic Classifier was tested over the course of two expansive studies that involved 639 patients.. While researchers reported a high number of false positives with Veracyte’s test, it proved to be more than 90 percent accurate when negative for cancer.
Spira and Veracyte’s procedure is gaining recognition as more than eight million Americans with a history of heavy smoking become eligible for annual CT screenings on account of new health coverage requirements.
So far in 2015, the American Cancer Society estimates there have been about 158,000 deaths from lung cancer, which 221,000 new cases cropping up in the first half of the year alone.