Cool! I'd invest but I'm broke

We're likely talking about decades of data. And probably find out many people have cancers all the time, with their immune system doing a great job of keeping it in check.

would make sense.

True but proper procedures as I outlined above for a real case can catch those that do turn malignant.
I've seen research that shows that our DNA undergoes and average of 5000 insults daily but that most are corrected. However, if the correction mechanism fails often enough, a cancer can develop.

"Early detection, we’re often told, is the surest way to beat cancer"
Most of the time if we get cancer our own immune system destroys it in the early stages. Many times if you go under the knife for it and it is exposed it spreads worse than if you have left it and lost the chance for the body to repair itself. Just saying some facts that they don't tell us.

Steve Jobs proves your point!

If someone dies after cancer surgery, it was due to a nasty cancer that already spread to other areas, and not due to the surgery. They would have been toast either way. There are more myth, lies, and superstition about cancer floating around than any other illness, mostly because it is so unpredictable, common, and awful.

Statistics please. And from our first hand family experience, competent medical teams lay out the risks and probabilities and let you make the decisions.

Dogs already do that.

True, I saw a documentary on that. The problem is dogs are not consistent performers or there is no guarantee they will be. Replicating what dogs can do will be priceless.

This seems like a great tool, but good luck getting it to market. Big Med won't like an inexpensive tool replacing their massively expensive diagnostic equipment and tests.

same thought crossed my mind... it would be a tragedy if this device was buried by big med

Man, big med really needs to be killed, incinerated, and have its ashes buried in the bottom of the ocean.

Then there will be no incentive to improve, and every new technology will be quietly buried since it might take away money for medical union raises and benefits.

That's a balance we've already tried to strike and have failed to strike because the system will always be overturned by money grubbing a-holes.

most new meds had a large part of its research done with federal tax dollars, the big secret big phrma doesn't want normal people to know when they ask for a 20 year monopoly because of " r'n'd "

and look up bell labs and how they hid technology,before they were blown up for the good of the country.

First hand experience or a conspiracy bystander?

I'd think Big Meds would eventually love to get their hands on this. There is money to be made through this, replaceable parts, cloud service and so. They probably stay off it until it shows its true potential.

"Big Insurance" will demand "Big Med" use it.

Most "Big Pharma" products are used to avoid surgeries which are very expensive, and "Big Bio" will eventually do the same thing.

So don't be a "Big Idiot". The medical system is not a group of competing conspiracies. They are all working in the free market system to make our lives better, and it's working.

The only "idiots" are those with their head stuck willingly in the sand who try to delegitimize appropriate concerns by labeling them as conspiracies. There exist conspiracy theories, and conspiracy facts. It's not difficult to parse the two. Unless of course, you're a sheep, content to be spoon fed the lies you've been inundated with since childhood. That's right. You've been lied to. Get over it.

I hope you print and cut out some of this nonsense you spout for when they day comes that you have a family you care about and are responsible for.

Baa, baa! Change the channel, chucklechan.

Then maybe you should go to "Big Witchdoctor".

Looks like you're the one on a conspiracy kick.

free market system? Ya right. There are so many subsidies i dont know how you can say that.And health insurers have more of a say over your free choices than you do when it comes to who what and where you get your healthcare. Most hospitals and insurance companies have consolidated so much its hardly a free market anymore in most states.

Just get it to market somewhere in the world (not the U.S. where the pharmaceutical lobby controls Congress like puppets) and the rest of the world will see what they are missing out on.

Big Med will ALWAYS find a way to make money, because people will continue to get sick, or require rejuvenation treatments, or body enhancement treatments, etc, etc...Big Med will make even more money the day recreational drugs become legal, and there's no social stigma attached to using them.

Regular, easy-to-take cancer screenings? Yes! Sign me up please! Doctors wouldn't even need to charge an arm and a leg for them (though they probably foolishly would at first) because who wouldn't want to have a very easy and simple screening for something that could be irreversably fatal? I know I'd get it every time I went to the doctor, and I'd definitely get it for my wife, for whom there is hereditary concerns.

Yes, but we're already all affected by that. We don't need a machine to figure that one out.

We're talking about early deaths and quality of life trauma even before death.

BigPharma would not jeopardize their $95B worth cancer industry!

I think this would actually be really good for them, earlier detection might indicate longer treatment periods and reoccurrence while late detection usually leads in patient loss in a relatively short time.

i agree farzad, anyone that is told they have cancer will go far and beyond what is needed just to make sure.

Not so.

Actually, this is big money. 10 million screenings at 100$ (just guessing) each = 1 billion a year. Add in all the extra people who have cancer and actually get diagnosed and treated using the much more expensive drugs... You get the picture.

All the strength of this invention anyway is not so much in the device itself, but in the process that will produce a diagnostic from the gathered data.

The menace of over-diagnosis is not actually a flaw, since it's the still to be determined diagnostic process that will decide which cancer is actually looked for and which isn't : it can very well be tweaked to satisfy the criticism. The device will be of considerable use in any case.

So yeah it's not the tool, it's how you use it.

No! This is a perfect example of why everyone should be required to learn statistics.

There's a very good reason we do not do mass screening for cancers and other serious diseases with low incidence, no risk of transmission, and invasive treatment regimens. Medical tests are not crystal balls. Any test you perform has a risk of false positives and a risk of false negatives, and even if you have a test with good *specificity* and *sensitivity*, applying any test to any large population with a low incidence of disease guarantees that most of the positive findings will be wrong. Go google specificity and sensitivity if you remain unconvinced.

Telling hundreds of thousands of healthy people that they have cancer and sending them through intensive workup and/or treatment when they actually do not is emotionally and financially harmful to them and the broader community.

This is why we do *not* do population-wide CT screening for lung cancer, why we no longer stress that young women without other risk factors have mammograms (but can choose to if they are risk averse and are okay with potentially receiving unnecessary treatment), why we are moving away from aggressive PSA screening, etc.

What's the alternative? Targeted screening. If you reduce the size of people you screen to those most likely to be affected, then you dramatically improve your results. So people with symptoms (obviously), people with certain exposures (asbestos), genetic predispositions to certain types of cancers (BRCA), etc. In other words, the thing that works best is what we already do. This product is solving a problem that doesn't exist.

Well this is a test that can be anticipated to be very sensitive *and* orthogonal to the established tests. Why not use "positives" from this test for subsequent 'targeted screening'? I don't think you have to try too hard to see the benefit of this ..

Unfortunately, what you say is correct.

So the real benefit, per the comment below, would not be to find more cancers, God forbid!, but instead to reduce the current amount of scattershot screening, testing and treating of asymptomatic individuals.

Clown, we do not have perfected personalized medicine and treatments yet. Maybe your confusing semantics and new ethics of going about cancer as it is ( less tension on constant mammograms etc. checks) as a sign of personalized targeted diagnostics and test.

What? No. The real reason they don't do as many tests here in the us is simple: COST. Insurance companies are doing everything to save a buck or two and if that means somebody doesn't get a cancer screening - so be it.

October 02, 2007 Lisa Girion Times Staff Writer
Google that article, I can't put links on here, she explains it.

These guys need to get put together with Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos. The technologies seem highly complementary.

Using this technology at regional blood banks (like UMass Medical) will allow researchers to gather valuable data across a regional population. Every patient at UMass is asked to submit a blood sample to the database, everytime they visit the facility. If patients are truthful about the meds they take these folks will have the ability to mine the data to see how different drugs mask specific uRNA markers (eliminate false negatives). Huge.

80% sounds a lot better than guessing. You can take the test so many times over a certain period of time to make that 80% a much better number

It is a tricky subject. From what I understand, everyone has cancer cells in their body most of the time. It is a strong immune system that keeps them under control. Is this device able to detect the difference between "normal background cancer" (for lack of a better expression) and a cancer that has started to overwhelm the immune system?

cancer is usually just rcells in your body getting the code wrong for whatever reason,and rather then being corrected it keeps repeating the bad code = turmors

Right. If this device is too sensitive it could end up causing unnecessary alarm and procedures in many people. I guess it will take a lot of experimenting to get it tuned just right.