New York (PTI): Scans or biopsy could soon be passe. If scientists are to be believed, a simple blood test may soon be able to detect lung cancer in its earliest stages with unprecedented accuracy.

A team at the University of Pennsylvania, led by an Indian-origin researcher Prof Anil Vachani, has identified genes within a patient's white blood cells that can show when the disease is present.

The researchers studied the effect of lung cancer in blood cells. "We found that the types of genes present in these cells could tell us whether or not cancer was present," Dr Vachani said.

To test the accuracy and validity of the method, the researchers recruited 44 patients with early stage lung cancer and 52 control subjects who were matched for age, smoking status, gender and race.

Subsequently, they used a number of genetic arrays to determine the best targets for detecting the presence of cancer. They found that a 15 gene array had the highest accuracy, at 87 per cent.

"These findings suggest that lung cancers interact with circulating white blood cells and change the types of genes that are active in these cells. This finding can be potentially used to develop a non-invasive diagnostic test for patients suspected of having lung cancer.

"A diagnostic test that could more accurately determine the risk of cancer in patients would be extremely valuable and have very important economic implications by reducing unnecessary surgery, biopsies and imaging tests.

"We are planning to perform validation studies to further evaluate the utility of this approach for diagnosing lung cancer in a larger population. If our results are encouraging, we would like to test this in a prospective clinical trial," the 'ScienceDaily' quoted Dr Vachani as saying.