Dr Abhijit Patel receives 2024 Lung Cancer Early Detection Award

Research award supports Indian American Yale professor’s transformative early detection technology to increase lung cancer-related survival rates

By Arun Kumar

Abhijit Patel, MD, PhD, an Indian American professor at Yale University School of Medicine, has received the 2024 Rising Tide Foundation for Clinical Cancer Research / LUNGevity Foundation Lung Cancer Early Detection Award to dramatically reduce lung cancer-related mortality.

Dr Patel and his close collaborator, Steven Skates, PhD, at Massachusetts General Hospital, have developed an exciting technical breakthrough that accurately measures tiny amounts of DNA fragments from cancer cells that are in the bloodstream, according to a media release.

READ: Juie Shah accepted into Forbes Communications Council (November 14th, 2024)

With the funding of this research project, the team aims to further develop this technique by creating a model that links the presence of these fragments in the blood with the presence of lung cancer in patients.

In addition, they are working toward creating an algorithm that tracks the changes in a patient’s blood over time. Taken together, this work lays the groundwork for a routine blood test for lung cancer to detect it at its earliest stages when it is the most curable, according to the release.

“This approach has additional advantages that can be a game-changer for the field of lung cancer,” explains Upal Basu Roy, PhD, MPH, executive director of LUNGevity Research.

“For example, if this blood test is used with the current screening tests, it can detect some types of lung cancer, such as squamous cell, that are often missed by screening. Squamous cell lung cancer is typically diagnosed at late stages. It has a high mortality rate and few treatment advances in recent years. But if we can stage-shift the diagnosis of squamous cell lung cancer to the earlier stages, we could revolutionize patient care.”

The blood test the team is working toward is also likely to have benefits in the diagnosis of lung cancer, the release states. It could be used to clarify the status of incidental pulmonary nodules and help reduce the number of unnecessary lung biopsies or follow-up tests.

The likelihood of surviving for five years or more after a lung cancer diagnosis is 27%. But if lung cancer is caught early, before it spreads, the five-year survival rate jumps to 64% and in some cases is curable. Unfortunately, only 22% of lung cancer is diagnosed in the earliest stage of the disease.

“There is a clear and pressing need to improve early detection of lung cancer,” said Dr Alexandre Alencar, head of cancer research programs at Rising Tide Foundation for Clinical Cancer Research. “And here, we have dedicated researchers with a possible solution in hand. It will be exciting to see where this work takes us.”

LUNGevity Foundation and Rising Tide Foundation have joined together in this collaborative partnership to stage-shift lung cancer so that the majority of patients are diagnosed in the early stages of disease when it is most treatable.

About 1 in 18 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer in their lifetime, according to LUNGevity Foundation, the nation’s leading lung cancer organization.

More than 234,000 people in the US will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year, with a new diagnosis every 2.2 minutes.

It is estimated that close to 65% of all new lung cancer diagnoses are among people with no tobacco exposure or only past tobacco exposure.

More lives are lost to lung cancer than to the next two deadliest cancers (colorectal and pancreatic) combined.

Only 27% of all people diagnosed with lung cancer will survive 5 years or more, but if it’s caught before it spreads, the chance of 5-year survival improves to 64%.

Rising Tide Foundation for Clinical Cancer Research is a charitable, nonprofit organization established in 2010 and located in Schaffhausen, Switzerland.