Here's a link to a new testing procedure from Johns Hopkins that I saw on the news last night.

http://www.tampabays10.com/news/health/article.aspx?storyid=71071

Lets hope they continue to find more and more early detection techniques and lets hope primary care physicians including dentists see if this can be implemented into their routine exams.

I am e mailing all the doctors & my long term dentist that examined me before, during and since my Tx ended even though this test doesn't appear to benefit HPV+ patients. I suggest everyone here do the same to help spread this technique. Imagine how many doctors we can tell in one day!!

david,, thanks for posting this info. It sure would be nice to detect OC this way instead of all the hit and miss we have had to do. Good Job there old buddy.

FYI this is already posted in the OCF news as well
http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/news/story.asp?newsId=2039

This test is a very early result of Califano's team's work. It is a long way from being an FDA approved test, and the work has to be duplicated in other institutions. More important, a test that is less than 50% effective at finding disease isn't very good by comparisons to other tests we commonly think of. It is far more likely that the saliva diagnostic test which was developed by OCF board member Dr. David Wong at UCLA, will become commercialized sooner than this swish test (if this one ever is). It has been replicated at 4 institutions, and not only has been shown to find oral cancers (of any origin) but will also find things like diabetes, breast cancer, and possibly next, early Alzheimer's in people. It already has some giant pharma/diagnostics companies looking at it to take to market.

The UCLA team are mapping the RNA and associated proteins for other diseases even as we speak to add to the assay the test can do. The NIH is very hot on the technology, and has spent about 60 million dollars in research on it so far. The test out of JH has a huge down side, and that is that the cost of analyzing the saliva solution is VERY expensive, making it perhaps prohibitive as a commercial product. On the other hand the salivary diagnostic test at UCLA is analyzed by a simple preprogrammed computer chip, that looks for certain biomarker factors in the saliva and is very inexpensive to do, making it an ideal mass screening tool, that anyone, not even a doctor, can administer. OCF has been a financial research supporter to the Wong idea early in the process, and we have been posting in the news section about the developments of the work for almost 5 years. (Search the news section for articles that have the words Wong, or UCLA in them.)

The technology of the swish test is interesting, but does not use any really new technique. More than that, things like this are developed all the time - the proof is if a big company with the financial resources to do so, will become interested enough to spend the millions to bring it to market and commercialize the idea. JH's test will likely never get over that particular obstacle.

As a side note, if people would subscribe to the free RSS feed from OCF

NPR's "Talk of the Nation-Science Friday" is having a segment on these tests today in just a couple of hours, in case anyone is interested in further details (or calling in with questions or comments)!

http://www.sciencefriday.com/

Can someone subscribe to the RSS Feeds and see if the link works??

I am getting an error message saying "IE cannot display..contains code errors."

Is it me or a bad link?? Tks, Deb

Deb
it works for me:

http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/news/index.asp
Click here to subscribe to our oral cancer in the news RSS feed
---> works

I have not played with this perhaps you need to enable cookies?
(I am using Safari (Mac, OSX)
(Setup: Enable plug-ins, enable Java Script, Accept cookies=always)

On the mac you can select the RSS stream also as a screen saver, very cool.

M

Just wanted to say that you can now listen to the
Science Friday" interview with the doc at Johns Hopkins by clicking on this link.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/
He said he thought this test would be available at least for oral cancer patients, who are at higher risk for recurrence, within 5 years.

I would gladly be in a clinical trial before then--even more so for the one that can detect breast cancer too! Is there a way to find out when and where those trials become available?

Nelie

I also can not go to that link on the page. I get the Page cannot be dispalyed screen and the XML page cannot be displayed screen.

URL works fine. feed://feeds.feedburner.com/oralcancernews

Once you open this page just drag it down to your browser header with your other favorites. When new news is added to it a number of new article will appear next to it.