X-Message-Number: 12446
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 04:29:24 -0700
From: Tim Freeman <>
Subject: Re: Why Is This Cancer Detection Not Used.

From: Olaf Henny <>
>I stumbled over a couple of abstracts in Medline, which describe an 
>apparently simple method to detect if any cancer is present in a body.  
>If this method is as effective as claimed (95% on first test; 99% on 
>second) it would safe an enormous amount on healthcare cost in cancer 
>treatment due to early detection.  

This was mentioned in an A4M conference a few years back.  I think the
speaker was Samuel Bogoch.  He said the test was available in the US,
and I have a phone book entry saying that you can call 1-800-922-8378
to get a test kit, which you then use to mail them a blood sample
(along with somewhere between $100 and $200) which they will test.

The gotcha is that if it's positive, you still don't know where the
cancer is, so you have an unpleasant treasure hunt to find out
*where*.  Also, if the chances are very small that you have cancer,
then even a positive result from a good test will still probably be a
false positive.  

However, some people are fairly likely to have cancer in a specific
place, either because of family history, specific symptoms, or recent
cancer treatment that may or may not have succeeded, so it seems that
ought to be useful sometimes.  There was talk in one of the papers of
solving this problem by using radiolabeled anti-malignin antibody to
label the cancer in the body, and then use some imaging technology to
indicated where the radiolabeled AMA accumulated.

Another citation is "Quantitative Pathology in Chemoprevention
Trials", Bogoch & Bogoch, 1994, pp 173-185, J. Cell. Biochem, Vol. 19.

A science citation index search to see if any negative results have
since been published would probably be worthwhile.

>So why are there no fast-track 
>approvals?  Why does the FDA or whoever is responsible for such 
>approvals in Italy, Israel or everywhere else not run with it?  Not 
>enough money (profit) in marketing such tests to warrant the 
>expenditures of large scale studies? 

I don't know why it isn't popular.

>Resistance by the large 
>pharmaceutical companies, which prefer the no doubt profitable sale 
>of medications?

Not likely.  They aren't a monolith.  If one company chose to market
the test, and that one company could make money doing it, that would
be a sufficient cause for it to become popular, even if that caused
other companies to lose money.

>I'd like to know.

Me too.
-- 
Tim Freeman       
            http://www.infoscreen.com/resume.html
Web-centered Java, Perl, and C++ programming in Silicon Valley or offsite

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