When Gila Cohen, a 58-year-old teacher from Tel Aviv, lost her father to lung cancer three years ago, she wondered why such a deadly disease was so hard to catch early. Now, researchers at Tel Aviv University are working to change that reality — with a simple blood test that could spot lung cancer faster and cheaper than ever before.
Lung cancer kills more people worldwide than any other cancer. Today, doctors mainly rely on CT scans to find the disease, but these scans often flag harmless spots, leading some patients to undergo unnecessary biopsies and surgeries. Other blood tests exist, but they require expensive DNA sequencing — a complex process that needs specialized equipment most hospitals do not have.
The new test, developed by a team at Tel Aviv University, takes a different approach. Instead of reading the full genetic code, it looks for a chemical "fingerprint" that cancer cells leave behind in the blood. The researchers mix a blood sample with a light-emitting marker, then pass it through a small DNA chip they invented. A scanner reads the light patterns, and special software spots the cancer signature within two to three days.
The results are striking. In a study of 103 people — 51 lung cancer patients and 52 healthy volunteers — the test correctly identified cancer 93.1 percent of the time. It also correctly identified healthy people 90.3 percent of the time. The test even told apart the two most common types of lung cancer, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, based on their different chemical signatures.
Perhaps most remarkably, each test costs about $60. That is a fraction of what current methods cost.
The research was led by Professor Yuval Ebenstein from the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, working with colleagues from JaxBio Technologies, Bnai Zion Medical Center, and Sheba Medical Center. Their findings appeared in the journal npj Precision Oncology.
Beyond diagnosis, the team explored whether the test could track how well treatments work. In patients whose tumors shrank after therapy, the blood fingerprint shifted toward a healthy pattern. Patients whose cancer kept growing showed no such change. The researchers caution this is an early finding and will need much larger studies to confirm.
"We have developed a new approach that does not require genetic sequencing but instead identifies the tumor's chemical fingerprint with light," Ebenstein said. "This is a significant step toward developing a tool that can complement imaging tests and help physicians diagnose lung cancer and monitor treatment effectiveness."
The team hopes the test could one day sit alongside CT scans as a helper for doctors, giving them another tool to catch the disease earlier and keep tabs on whether treatments are truly working. For patients like Gila's family, that future cannot come soon enough.