Speaker
Description
Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer in the world and its survival decreases with the stage at which it is diagnosed. It has been proven that screening people for lung cancer with low dose computed tomography (an X-ray machine that uses a small amount of radiation to make detailed images of the lungs) can reduce mortality by allowing to detect the cancer at an earlier stage when treatment are more effective.
However, currently this type of screening still has some limitations including missing half of future lung cancer cases, having a high detection of false positives (persons for whom the test suggest they have lung cancer when no cancer is present) which can lead to follow-up tests and surgeries that are not needed and may have more risks, and finding cases of cancer that may never have caused a problem for the patient (called overdiagnosis) which can lead to treatment that is not needed.
In this talk, I will explain how we used proteins measured in blood of healthy people to define their individual risk of getting a lung cancer and inform who should be screened.
