When women get a blood test during pregnancy that looks at free-floating DNA, they expect it to tell about the health of the fetus. But the test sometimes finds signs of cancer in the mother.
When women get a blood test during pregnancy that looks at free-floating DNA, they expect it to tell about the health of the fetus. But the test sometimes finds signs of cancer in the mother.
“That’s really all that I was expecting,” she says.
“I didn’t know that you could find out something about yourself from it.”
“Imagine a simple blood test during an annual physical that could detect cancer early, when the chances of a cure are best,” ...
A cancer moonshot
...Biden said recently, adding that the National Cancer Institute is planning a large clinical trial to explore this approach.
“Do we really understand that in all of these different cancers at the earliest stages, they’re releasing this ...
...DNA in a way that is reproducible, that we can measure and understand that it’s early or late?” asks Minasian.
“There’s so much we don’t know about this. We need to do the trials so we can get the information.”
‘I wasn’t thinking about myself’
“It ended up being the same kind of scenario,” she says.
“I wasn’t thinking anything about myself, really, at all,” recalls Aukstikalnis.
“I was more worried about the baby.”
Inconclusive results led Aukstikalnis to undergo a series of other tests, with results suggesting that she likely ...
...had lymphoma. She was able to start chemotherapy before her baby was born, who then entered the world healthy.
Inconclusive results led Aukstikalnis to undergo a series of other tests, with results suggesting that she likely ...
...had lymphoma. She was able to start chemotherapy before her baby was born, who then entered the world healthy.
“So that was really difficult to wrap my head around,” says Aukstikalnis.
In those cases, these tests help to make decisions about how to best treat these patients.
A genetic needle in a DNA haystack
“Early detection is so much harder. It’s really a beast,” says Pritchard, adding that trying to spot DNA released into the blood by a small number of cancerous cells is a needle-in-the-haystack problem.
“I went from being a huge skeptic,” says Pritchard, “to being like, ‘Well, okay, this is a viable approach and this could work. The trouble is, “we don’t know who should be tested,” he adds.
“It was kind of like a no-brainer for me that we were going to go with NIH and see what they could find out about it,” says Aukstikalnis, “and go from there.”
What to do with these results
“I think to the average person, if you have cancer, you don’t feel well, you have some lump, bump, some sort of scary symptom,” says Turriff, “and that’s just not the experience of the people being referred to us.”
“Everyone thought we were a little bit crazy in the beginning,” recalls Bianchi, who says the general attitude was that “there’s no way these healthy women are going to have cancer.”
“Of the ones who have been enrolled and have had the full workup, over half of them do have a tumor,” says Bianchi.
“So this is not a trivial finding. Our take home message is, this really needs to be taken seriously.”
“What we’ve found most commonly is lymphoma. But we found extremely rare cancers as well, like 1-in-a-million type of cancers,” says Bianchi.
“Hearing that news that you have cancer, it’s hard to describe. It’s just such, like, an overwhelming experience,” she says.
An overwhelming experience
“And then you’re also pregnant at the same time. Your emotions are kind of all over the place. It was definitely really difficult.” In November of last year, her family welcomed a baby girl named McKenna.
“Everything went really smoothly with delivery and she was perfectly normal, she is perfectly healthy,” says Aukstikalnis.
“That was always something I was nervous about, was it the right decision to get treatment while I was pregnant, you know, could it still end up causing issues? And it didn’t. She is doing really well.”
“It’s like being a newborn baby, all over again,” she says.
“It’s going to take a long time, but I’ve made it this far, so I know that we can get there.”
“I’m incredibly grateful that I found out when I did and then found out I could get treatment at an early stage,” she says.
“Even though things have been really difficult, I would also say there have been a lot of positive experiences. It really shifted my focus to the things that matter most.”