The test aims to speed the detection of lung cancer, which often isn’t found until the later stages.
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UK scientists have developed a new test to speed up the detection of lung cancer – by finding “zombie cells” in people’s urine.
Lung cancer, the deadliest type of cancer worldwide, killed nearly 227,000 people in the European Union in 2021.
It often isn’t diagnosed until later stages when symptoms appear or it has spread to other parts of the body, making it more difficult to treat.
The new tool, which uses an injectable sensor to test urine samples, aims to help doctors identify the disease before it spreads.
“Early detection of cancer requires cost-effective tools and strategies that enable detection to happen quickly and accurately,” Ljiljana Fruk, co-lead of the project and a professor in the chemical engineering and biotechnology department at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement.
The test hunts for proteins released by senescent cells, which are called “zombie cells” because they are alive in the body but have stopped multiplying. These cells can accumulate in the body and cause inflammation and tissue damage, enabling cancer cells to form.
The new test, which is in early-stage trials, interacts with zombie cell proteins by releasing a compound into urine that can be easily detected, tipping scientists off to their presence.
The results could indicate that a patient has early-stage lung cancer.
“We designed a test based on peptide-cleaving proteins, which are found at higher levels in the presence of zombie cells, and in turn appear in the early stages of cancer,” Fruk said.
The tool has reportedly been successfully tested in mice studies, and Fruk’s team is preparing for human trials.
The goal, Fruk said, is that the urine test could eventually be used to detect other forms of cancer months or even years before symptoms appear.
If it works in human studies, the test “will spot [lung] cancer earlier and avoid the need for invasive procedures, but this test does have potential for other cancers,” she said.
