Scientists identify proteins that can predict lung cancers more than five years before diagnosis

"Early research suggests a path to predict and prevent lung cancer."

That was the headline of a recent story by Nina Agrawal that appeared on the online site of The New York Times. 

The subhead? "Scientists have identified proteins that could signal increased lung cancer risk, as well as a drug that could reduce the odds of a tumor developing."

A team of more than 80 researchers "working across four continents have identified a set of proteins in the blood that accurately predict lung cancers more than five years before diagnosis," the story says.

It indicates, too, that the scientists "also found early evidence that an existing anti-inflammatory drug [canakinumab] could significantly reduce lung cancer risk in people with elevated concentrations of these proteins, which they linked to inflammation."

The findings were published in the journal Cell. Lung cancer, the Times story says, "kills more people worldwide than any other cancer." Fewer than one-third of people diagnosed survive past five years.

Dr. Charles Swanton

"Prevention is the solution in my mind," the article quotes Dr. Charles Swanton, oncologist and director of the Francis Crick Institute in the United Kingdom who was senior author of the  paper. 

Swanton, who recently joined the board of Novartis, the maker of canakinumab, also contends that the findings suggest "smoke causes mutations and inflammation, which together cause cancer."

The drug, according to the story, "nearly halved the risk of lung cancer among 2,300 patients in the trial who had higher-than-average expression of the 14 proteins."

Dr. Peter Mazzone, a pulmonologist at the Cleveland Clinic, on the other hand, offers a massive caveat. He's quoted as warning about canakinumab's potential side effects, including increased risk of infection and sepsis, and says that "even within a narrow population, it could still be too toxic for the benefit to outweigh the harms. It's possible that a different medicine that targets the same pathway could work and would be safer." 

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