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- Posted April 7, 2026
Cheap Blood Test Might Spot Cancers, Other Diseases
A simple and cost-effective blood test might be able to help detect multiple cancers and other diseases, a new study says.
The test works by analyzing DNA fragments in a person’s bloodstream and could offer a powerful and affordable approach to screening for cancer and other health problems, researchers reported April 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Early detection is crucial,” said senior researcher Jasmine Zhou, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“Survival rates are far higher when cancers are caught before they spread,” Zhou said in a news release. “If you detect cancer at stage one, outcomes are dramatically better than at stage four.”
The test, called MethylScan, analyzed DNA that cells from every organ naturally shed into the bloodstream. This genetic material carries signals that reflects what is happening in the body.
“Every day, 50 to 70 billion cells in our body die. They don’t just disappear, their DNA goes into the bloodstream,” Zhou said. “That means we already have information from all our organs circulating in the blood.”
The test specifically evaluates a process called DNA methylation, in which chemical tags attached to DNA help regulate gene activity. Methylation patterns differ by tissue type, and can change when cells become cancerous or diseased.
“DNA methylation reflects the health status of a tissue,” researcher Wenyuan Li, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UCLA, said in a news release. “It’s a very informative signal.”
Fortunately, most of this bloodborne DNA doesn’t come from tumors or injured organs. About 80% to 90% originates from healthy blood cells, which creates background noise for the test.
Researchers got around that by developing a technique that removes most of this background DNA prior to genetic sequencing. This process selectively ignores unmethylated DNA fragments.
To test the accuracy of MethylScan, researchers analyzed blood samples from 1,061 people, including patients with liver, lung, ovarian and stomach cancers. Others had liver diseases like hepatitis B, hepatitis C, alcohol-related liver disease and fatty liver disease.
With a specificity of 98% — meaning few false positives — the test detected about 63% of cancers across all stages and about 55% of early-stage cancers, researchers found.
MethylScan detected nearly 80% of liver cancer cases at a specificity of just over 90%. It also could distinguish between different types of liver disease, correctly classifying about 85% of patients.
The methylation patterns tracked by the test helped identify where in the body a signal was coming from.
“Being able to trace signals back to their source is important because a positive blood test needs to be followed by imaging or other diagnostic procedures directed at the right organ,” Li said.
Larger trials are needed to confirm the test’s performance in real-world screening, researchers said.
“This study demonstrates that blood-based methylation profiling can deliver clinically meaningful information across multiple diseases,” Zhou said. “It’s an exciting advancement that brings us closer to realizing the dream of a single assay for universal disease detection.”
More information
The American Cancer Society has more on cancer screening,
SOURCE: UCLA, news release, April 1, 2026
