Sticking Our Noses into Lung Cancer

Lung cancer kills over 1.5 million people per year worldwide (1) – and even though its prevalence has slowly declined over the last few decades, the five-year survival rate after diagnosis is still only 17.7 percent (2). At the moment, lung cancer lesions are detected via costly CT scan or by lung biopsy, which is both expensive and invasive. Better screening for the disease could boost survival rates – and The Boston University School of Medicine may have the solution – a simple nasal swab (3).

In 2015, a BU group conducted research showing that bronchial airway epithelia outside a cancerous site can carry the genetic signature of lung cancer (4). Following on from that study, the investigators hypothesized that those malignant traces might present themselves even farther away from the cancer – in the nasal airway – in smoking-induced instances of the disease. They evaluated the nasal epithelia of current and former smokers going through diagnostic evaluation for pulmonary lesions and discovered that 535 genes in those samples were linked with diagnosis of lung cancer (3). More research is needed to validate the findings, but the investigators are confident that their discovery could eventually lead to a novel noninvasive test for lung cancer detection. But even without a current diagnostic to take advantage of their efforts, these findings are significant.

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References

1. Cancer Research UK, “Lung cancer mortality in Europe and worldwide”. Available at: http://bit.ly/2nFQ7M2. Accessed March 21, 2017. National Cancer Institute, “Cancer stat facts: lung and bronchus cancer”, (2017). Available at: http://bit.ly/2mWbmbd. Accessed March 16, 2017. For the AEGIS Study Team, “Shared gene expression alterations in nasal and bronchial epithelium for lung cancer detection” J Natl Cancer Inst, 109, (2017). DH Whitney et al., “Derivation of a bronchial genomic classifier for lung cancer in a prospective study of patients undergoing diagnostic bronchoscopy”, BMC Med Genomics, 8, (2015). PMID: 25944280.

About the Author(s)

William Aryitey

My fascination with science, gaming, and writing led to my studying biology at university, while simultaneously working as an online games journalist. After university, I travelled across Europe, working on a novel and developing a game, before finding my way to Texere. As Associate Editor, I’m evolving my loves of science and writing, while continuing to pursue my passion for gaming and creative writing in a personal capacity.

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