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An Easy and Reliable Way to Discover Cancer Early

By Margie Sloan

Cancer. The very sight or sound of the word scares me to death . . . the death of both my dear parents in the 1980's and, given the influence of genetics, the very real possibility of my own.

Like the rest of humankind, I pray that everyone who gets cancer is cured, no matter how far the cancer may have spread by the time it is found. But I also know that early diagnosis holds the greatest potential for cure. That is why I have long wished I could have a glimpse into the future, a crystal ball into which I could peer and see my body and its hidden secrets. Would there be cancer? Perhaps so, perhaps not.

Recently I was given my wish. I was able to look into the modern version of a crystal ball. It was a simple blood test. In a few short hours I had an answer. I don't have any of thirteen common cancers.

The relief in knowing this is overwhelming for someone like myself who has witnessed the pain of losing someone to this disease. It is always possible, of course, that I could get cancer in the future, but for now I am satisfied to know there is a way I can detect cancer early.

Let me tell you a little about this modern crystal ball.

AMDL, Inc. of Tuston, California, a developer of "in vitro diagnostic test kits" developed the DR-70 (TM) blood test over a period of eleven years at a cost of about $15 million.

Gary L. Dreher, chairman of AMDL said the test is simple, non-invasive, inexpensive and available to physicians and research laboratories and hospitals in the United States.

"The DR-70(TM) is already approved for general marketing throughout Canada by the Health Protection Agency, the equivalent in Canada to our Food & Drug Administration (FDA) here in the United States," Dreher said. "Through an FDA research exemption, initial sales of the blood test in the United States will be restricted to hospitals and commercial and research laboratories pending approval for general marketing."

When asked for details of the test and how it works, Dreher explained that the entire test takes only an hour or two and costs about $100. After fasting overnight, the patient has 2 cc of whole blood taken from a venous specimen from the arm. The laboratory uses the serum portion of the blood for testing.

"What the test does," he said, "is to quantify the amount of DR-70 tumor marker in a patient's sera. The laboratory can know with a high degree of specificity if he or she has one or more of the 13 most serious and most common cancers. That is the sole purpose of the test. If positive, other standard tests could be employed to determine the specific cancer."

The thirteen cancers detected with the DR-70(TM) are cancers of the lung, colon, breast, stomach, liver, rectum, ovary, esophagus, cervix, trophablast, thyroid, malignant lymphoma and pancreas.

What this means to me is that with $100 and 2 cc of blood taken from my arm, I am to know ahead of time whether or not I need to see an oncologist, since so many cancers are symptom free until they are well established and often metastasized. To know in advance could easily save my life -- and surely save me from the rigors of aggressively treating a growing cancer in my body.

Dreher said that, "currently, once a person is diagnosed as having a specific cancer, the cancer often is too far along to cure or manage successfully. In many cases, this means many years of suffering, treatment or both, and the possibility of an earlier than normal demise."

Clinical trials of the DR-70(TM) test have been successfully conducted in Canada, Taiwan, Chili and Turkey. Results of the trials, in which the tests detected the presence of one or more of the 13 cancers 84% of the time overall, were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, "The Journal of Immunoassay."

© Copyright 2000, Margie Sloan, argiema@yahoo.com