A blood test designed to detect more than 50 types of cancer, including kidney cancer, at an early stage will be trialled by the NHS.

The Galleri test, which will be trialled across the UK, claims to detect cancers that are not routinely screened for and can pinpoint where in the body the disease is coming from with a high degree of accuracy.

Catching cancer early is vital to people receiving prompt treatment and the test has the potential to save thousands of lives in the UK every year.

It works by looking for chemical changes in fragments of genetic code that leak from tumours into the bloodstream.

Some cancer tumours are known to shed DNA into the blood a long time before a person would start experiencing symptoms.

The Galleri test does not detect all cancers and does not replace NHS screening programmes, such as those for breast, cervical and bowel cancer.

In the US, it has been recommended for people at higher risk of cancer, including the over-50s.

As part of the NHS trial, which is the world’s largest, blood samples will be taken from Monday at several mobile testing clinics in retail parks and other community locations.

The NHS aims to recruit 140,000 volunteers in eight areas of England to see how well the test works in the health service.

Letters are being sent to people from different backgrounds and ethnicities aged between 50 and 77 asking them to take part.

Participants, who must not have had a cancer diagnosis in the last three years, will be asked to give a blood sample at a local mobile clinic and they will then be invited back after 12 months, and again at two years, to give further samples.

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A drug inhibiting hepatitis C viral entry into cells may hold promise in treating clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), as it inhibits cholesterol uptake that maintains cancer cell viability, according to recent research conducted at Penn Medicine in a America

The researchers found that inhibiting SCARB1, can keep ccRCC cells from multiplying – or even destroy them altogether – highlighting the potential for a new way to treat the disease. SCARB1 is a protein on the surface of cells that allows them to import cholesterol, which fuels ccRCC survival and growth.

“So we know that the (cancer) cells are surprisingly dependent on cholesterol. They’re equally dependent on this particular cholesterol transporter to bring it in. It turns out, the protein is actually a co-receptor for the hepatitis C virus,” said researcher M. Celeste Simon, PhD who is the Arthur H. Rubenstein, MBBCh professor in the department of Cell and Developmental Biology and the scientific director of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, in an interview with CURE®.

Simon said that it’s a “lucky break” that there are drugs for hepatitis C that inhibit SCARB1 and have already been tested in clinical trials for safety and effectiveness. The next step would be to study them in the cancer space.

Trials evaluating the SCARB1 inhibitor for ccRCC are currently underway in mice. Next, they will be tested in humans.

“We know that these (drugs) are pretty well-tolerated in patients who may have hepatitis C, but how well tolerated are they in patients with renal cancer? We don’t know that, yet, but that’s where we want to go,” said Simon.

Down the line, if these drugs work, they may be a treatment option for a broader group of patients with ccRCC than immunotherapy or other targeted agents that – while promising and effective – tend to only work on a smaller percentage of patients.

“In the study of cancer, especially intensively over the last 50 years, a lot of progress has been made in understanding the underlying genetics of cancer, which is daunting because the changes are numerous and they keep evolving, with changes in the structure of chromosomes, signaling pathways and oncogenes that there are so-called ‘targeted therapies’ for,” Simon said. “But what lagged behind up until about 20 years ago is how do metabolic changes go along with that?”

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