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In the February 19, 2014 issue of Science Translational Medicine (Sci Transl Med. 2014 Feb 19;6(224):224ra24), Bettegowda and colleagues in the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research center at Johns Hopkins report on an exciting approach to the detection of pancreatic cancer. Bettegowda and colleagues applied cutting edge DNA sequencing to blood samples from a large number of patients with a number of different cancers. They found that many cancers, even some small curable cancers, shed mutant DNA into the blood.

When a person dies from cancer, the culprit is usually not the original tumor but rather the cancerous cells that spread throughout the body and replicate in distant organs, a process called metastasis. Researchers have long known that metastasizing cancer cells slip their bonds and avoid immune detection by altering the sugars on their surfaces. They've even come up with a would-be drug to prevent such sugar alterations. But that compound interferes with needed sugars on normal cells, too, with lethal results in animals. Now, Dutch researchers report that they've packaged the drug in nanoparticles targeted exclusively to cancer cells, and they've shown that this combination prevents cancer cells from metastasizing in mice.  

In Milan, two German Shepherds trained for this particular task have certainly proven themselves accurate. The dogs were trained to detect specific chemicals in urine samples. One dog successfully identified prostate cancer in 98.7% of samples, and the other dog successfully identified prostate cancer in 97.6% of samples.

Staging describes the severity of a person's cancer based on the size and/or extent (reach) of the original (primary) tumor and whether or not cancer has spread in the body.

Reporting on a small preliminary study, Johns Hopkins researchers say a simple blood test based on detection of tiny epigenetic alterations may reveal the earliest signs of pancreatic cancer, a disease that is nearly always fatal because it isn't usually discovered until it has spread to other parts of the body.

Engineers at MIT and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have devised a new way to detect cancer that has spread to the liver, by enlisting help from probiotics - beneficial bacteria similar to those found in yogurt.

Recently, in an article in the New Republic, 'The Animals That Can Save Your Life', journalist Emma Young introduces readers to the emerging science of training animals to detect things humans cannot.