A new breath test could “revolutionise” care for pancreatic cancer patients, experts have said.
A trial is to assess the effectiveness of a world-first breath test for the disease, which is notoriously hard to spot in its early stages.
Pancreatic Cancer UK, which is funding the study, said the launch of the trial was “the most significant step toward a lifesaving-breakthrough in 50 years”.
Vague symptoms of the disease, including back pain and indigestion, mean the disease is often not detected until it has spread to other parts of the body.
A recent audit of pancreatic cancer in England and Wales found that the majority of pancreatic cancer patients are diagnosed at a late stage – 62 per cent of patients in England and 65 per cent of patients in Wales are diagnosed at stage four.
Survival rates are particularly poor for this type of cancer – some 22 per cent do not survive for 30 days after diagnosis in England compared to 21 per cent in Wales.
Now scientists at Imperial College London are hoping to turn the tide on the disease with the new breath test.
It will be tested among 6,000 patients with an unknown diagnosis across 40 sites in England, Wales and Scotland.
If proven effective, it is hoped the test could be rolled out across GP surgeries within five years, meaning patients could be diagnosed sooner when treatment may be more effective.
The large trial follows a smaller study of 700 patients over two years which had “promising” results.
The test is used to detect a combination of “volatile organic compounds” present in the breath.
Thousands of these compounds travel around the bloodstream and are filtered out when the blood reaches the lungs and then expelled out with breath, the charity said.
It said these changes are evident even when the cancer is in its earliest stage of disease.
Isolating unique combinations of these compounds can pinpoint whether or not a person has pancreatic cancer, with results available for GPs in just three days.
At present, patients with suspected pancreatic cancer are referred for scans, or sent to the hospital for further investigations.
Diana Jupp, chief executive of Pancreatic Cancer UK – which is providing £1.1 million to fund the study, said: “The breath test has the potential to revolutionise the early detection of pancreatic cancer.
“It is, undoubtedly, the most significant step toward a lifesaving breakthrough in 50 years.
“While more years of development are still needed before we can put this exciting new technology into the hands of GPs across the country, thousands of patients with an unknown diagnosis will now help refine it in the real-world.
“This is the first pancreatic cancer breath test to ever reach a national clinical trial of this scale. That in itself makes this a moment of real, tangible hope.
“For decades the deadliest common cancer has been seen as too great a challenge to solve but we are determined to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s thought possible.”
Professor George Hanna, head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London – who is leading the project, said: “If our findings from the initial phase of the breath test study can be validated in a population of patients with an unknown diagnosis, it has huge potential to influence clinical practice and pancreatic cancer referral pathways.
“The funding announced today means we can now move quickly to that patient validation study stage, which is a very exciting next step for us. We look forward to seeing how the test performs in this group of patients with suspected cancer.”
