New $500 Blood Test Can Detect 8 Cancers Before Symptoms Develop

An international team of researchers have developed a new test that screens for multiple types of cancer using only a blood sample.

The research published today in Science and led by scientists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore describes a new test called CancerSEEK, which simultaneously looks for the presence of eight different types of cancer, including lung, breast and colorectal cancers, which are together responsible for more than 60 percent of cancer deaths in the U.S.

The researchers took blood samples from 1,005 people with one of the eight different cancer types, finding that CancerSEEK was able to reliably identify the tumors in 70% cases.