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Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

japantimes.co.jp

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Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

#71

Post by ak217 »

drderidder wrote: post #56
dannykwells wrote: post #40

Not even in trials yet. GRAIL is running a 100K person trial, to read out next year. Also, not one paper showing this kind of prediction in the clinic, which GRAIL, freenome, Guardant etc all have. No meaningful papers published + huge claims +single drop of blood = TheranosII

Don't confuse a US-centric view of medical technology development, western medical journals, US trials etc with something developed in Japan. This is Toshiba, working with the (Japanese) National Cancer Center Research Institute and you can be sure there's extensive research behind it, even if it's in Japanese.

Can you please post links to the research that you mention?

Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

#72

Post by happysadpanda2 »

hermitdev wrote: post #68
zxcmx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just telling millions of people per year they might have cancer... say the MRI is booked for 2 weeks out... which they are then going to majorly stress about the whole time regardless of how low you tell them the risk is - is going to have some crazy societal impact.

I typically have several MRIs per year. I'm not claustrophobic and don't stress about them, but sometimes MRIs cause me physical discomfort, even without contrast. With contrast, its slightly worse, it seems. I think its related to a genetic disorder that causes me to retain high levels of iron, but I have nothing to back this up. This discomfort in the MRI comes in the form of waves of warmth I feel throughout my ab…

I believe the stress would come from the uncertainty of whether or not they have cancer, not from going into the MRI machine.

Just looking at myself, I feel a great level of distress over other, less serious, variations of uncertainty. Having been told I might have cancer, and then not getting to know for certain this very instant would be nothing short of nerve-wracking...

Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

#73

Post by bsder »

phire wrote: post #4
PeterisP wrote: post #2

It's kind of what Theranos promised but didn't deliver?

I don't think so. Theranos wanted to do any and all blood tests from a single drop of blood. Toshiba is limiting themselves to just a single kind of test, which I'm guessing the science agrees is possible with such a small blood sample.

The signal to noise ratio is still devastatingly bad.

Most cancers aren't throwing large amounts of detectable crap into your bloodstream. If they were, people would be doing routine cancer tests when you do things like cholesterol screening.

The fact that nobody can do this with vials makes me suspicious of being able to do this with drops.

Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

#75

Post by segfaultbuserr »

dannykwells wrote: post #40

Not even in trials yet. GRAIL is running a 100K person trial, to read out next year. Also, not one paper showing this kind of prediction in the clinic, which GRAIL, freenome, Guardant etc all have. No meaningful papers published + huge claims +single drop of blood = TheranosII

Jokes aside, my understanding is that diagnosing diseases using a drop of blood was once a promising and legitimate application of microfluidic & lab-on-a-chip technology and many believed it was the future. The problem of Theranos was that the company was being completely delusional about its serious limitations, and now everything that involves "a drop of blood" has a bad name afterwards.

Is there anyone who work in the related area of research? Could you give us an overview of the actual progress of the technology today? What can the technology do today? And what is the limitations?

Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

#78

Post by leokennis »

_Microft wrote: post #19
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's very cheap, fast and convenient, then it's enough for at least screen the population regularly. Catching only part of the cancers is quite nice already.

No, not necessarily. Check out these numbers: Sensitivity is what fraction of the affected people are actually found. Here: 90%, so 10% are missed. Specificity is what fraction of the unaffected people are detected as such. Here: 95%, so 5% wrongly detected ("false positives"). In Europe, there are 60 cases of lung cancer per 100 000 people. That makes 54 correctly detected per 100 000, missing 6 cases. That also mea…

Isn’t the gain of this kind of machine that you are testing many people that weren’t tested at all before? Some of those will get a scare for nothing, but more will find out earlier that they have cancer.

If all it takes is a drop of blood (as opposed to more invasive tests) to know with ~90% accuracy if I have cancer or not (and when the machine says I do, then do a more accurate follow up test) then it’s far more likely more people will get diagnosed sooner.

Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

#80

Post by maneesh »

robbiep wrote: post #69
nugget wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What follow on test for suspected lung cancer would risk the life of a not insignificant number of people? An MRI without contrast has no impact. An MRI with contrast has relatively little impact. A biopsy would only be done if the MRI with contrast lit up areas of concern. At the point a PET is ordered, you have narrowed the false positive pool substantially and probably want the scan no matter what.

Quite rare to jump straight to an MRI - a chest MRI is a half hour deal. More common to do a CT Chest which has a 1:500 risk of causing cancer

Does this mean that out of the 5000 false positives, 10 people will actually GET cancer by doing a follow-up CT exam?
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