CLEVELAND, Ohio ― Dr. Eric Klein is the chairman of Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute. He says detecting cancer early is the key to easier treatment and increased chances of survival. That’s why he's excited about this promising new blood test that can catch many cancers before any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease.

What You Need To Know


  • A promising new blood test can catch many cancers before any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease

  • The Cleveland Clinic and 142 other hospital systems across the country took part in the study

  • Doctors say the test could be a game changer for how cancer patients are monitored and treated

“For things like liver cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, we generally don't diagnose them until the patient is symptomatic, which means usually the tumor is at a more advanced stage and harder to cure. So, the power of a test like this is, if the results can be replicated, is that we can pick up these cancers that normally stay silent until they're very hard to treat or incurable, at a much earlier stage when they should be easier to cure, and that can be a game changer,” Klein said.

The Cleveland Clinic and 142 other hospital systems across the country took part in the study. It included 15,000 patients who agreed to give a blood sample so doctors could determine if they had cancer cells in their blood stream. Most had a known diagnosis of cancer and those who didn’t served as the controls. 

“We can detect them with a false positive rate of less than 1 percent, so we're not going to be telling a lot of normal people that they have cancer when they don't,“ Klein said.

Doctor Mikkael Sekeres, who was a co-principal investigator of the trial along with Klein, says the testing has been validated in the population of patients who have a known cancer diagnosis, and the next step is focusing on those with no known diagnosis of cancer.

“This lays the groundwork for then focusing on that next step. So, it's found that the test is very accurate in people who have known diagnoses of cancer, is able to detect more cancer in people who have known advanced stages of cancer, so, it's picking up more as we would expect it would, and then in the future, we want to be able to use this in people who have no known cancer to make sure that it's accurate in that population also,” Sekeres said.

Sekeres says the test could be a game changer for how cancer patients are monitored and treated. 

“I can imagine that it's gonna totally change our programs for how we monitor people who've had a known diagnosis of cancer over the years. Instead of having to go for CAT scans every three months, six months, a year, maybe those now go for a blood test a couple times a year instead of having to do biopsies on these patients or procedures that nobody enjoys,” Sekeres said.

Klein says there are over 100 types of cancers, but only a few of them that have established screenings for early detection. 

“We only have four cancers that we have established screening tests for, right, that's breast, colon, lung, and prostate. All these other cancers that are, that account for a lot of morbidity and deaths due to cancer in the United States, we don't have good screening tests for, so that's what this test is intended to address, is to fill that gap, that unmet need to develop a screening program for those cancers,” Klein said.

He hopes, if fully validated, this test can become a part of your trip to the doctor's office. 

“We hope that eventually this could be part of a routine physical exam for healthy patients who are at risk for cancer either because of age or because of a family history of certain cancers, or because they have a genetic predisposition to cancer, that sort of thing," Klein said.