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A new blood test is able to detect early-stage pancreatic cancer with notable levels of success, which experts have said could be a "promising" step forward for both diagnostics and treatment.
Researchers from across the U.S. and in China, Korea and Japan said that the new test, which combines three biological markers, could potentially give doctors more time to act before a more invasive form of the cancer develops.
The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine on September 16.
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Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly cancers and more than 67,000 people are diagnosed with the cancer in the U.S. each year, according to the American Cancer Society. It is a very difficult cancer to detect early because the pancreas is located deep inside the body, meaning that tumors can't always be seen or felt by health care providers during routine physical exams. Patients often don't have symptoms either until the cancer has become very large or has already spread to other organs.
"The results presented are very impressive and promising, greatly exceeding the limitations of the current 'gold standard,' the CA19-9 blood-based marker," Channing Der, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Newsweek.
How Is Pancreatic Cancer Currently Detected?
Symptoms of pancreatic cancer include abdominal pain, weight loss, itching and jaundice (yellow skin). A doctor will usually start the process of diagnosis by taking the patient's medical history and conducting a physical examination to check for any lumps in the abdomen.
Laboratory tests are also done to check the patient's bile flow and any other abnormalities, before a CT or MRI scan is done. If a mass is seen via the imaging on the pancreas, a biopsy is then usually taken.
Der said that currently, most pancreatic cancers are diagnosed when "it has advanced and spread to other organs, making it challenging to treat with surgery and chemotherapy."
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How Does The New Blood Test Work?
The new test, called PANXEON, screens a patient for three markers: circulating microRNAs, exosomal microRNAs and carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9)—all of which are signals in the blood associated with pancreatic cancer.
It then uses artificial intelligence (AI) to combine the measurements into a single score that estimates a patient's likelihood of having pancreatic cancer.
Ajay Goel, study lead and professor of molecular diagnostics and experimental therapeutics at the City of Hope Medical Center, California, told Newsweek that by looking at more than one biological signal it gives doctors "a more complete molecular picture" of the patient's health.
The test correctly identified patients with stage 1 and 2 of the cancer in 87 percent of cases out of almost 1,800 people across the U.S., Europe and Asia. It also had a fairly low false-positive rate, at around 3 percent in low-risk groups and 16 percent in high-risk groups.
PANXEON also detected high-grade dysplasia, an advanced precancerous lesion, in about 64 percent of cases.
Goel said that this finding "raises the possibility that the future of pancreatic cancer detection may extend beyond finding cancer earlier to identifying dangerous disease before invasive cancer has developed."
Dr. Robert Vonderheide, director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told Newsweek that "finding a simple test to catch pancreatic cancer early could be an absolute game-changer, especially since this disease is notoriously difficult to spot until it is too late."
However, he added that for it to succeed for patients, "any new test must avoid false alarms," and for individuals at high-risk for pancreatic cancer, it needs to "reliably find tumors on par with current scans, and be as close to flawless as possible before we could consider it for the general public."
"Addressing these rigorous performance benchmarks is where the field should focus next, and sustained commitment to cancer research is what will deliver life-saving early-detection breakthroughs to our clinics," he said.
What Does This Mean for Patients?
Goel said that he didn't think PANXEON would replace scans like MRIs and ultrasounds, and that its "most realistic role would be as a blood-based triage tool for people already known to be at increased risk," which could "potentially help clinicians identify which patients need earlier imaging, endoscopic evaluation or more intensive follow-up."
The key significance of the findings is that it could have the potential to "shift the timing of diagnosis," he added.
"Pancreatic cancer is so lethal largely because we find it after the window for curative treatment has begun to close," he said. "If we can move more diagnoses into stage I or stage II, or even identify high-grade dysplasia before invasion, we may give patients more opportunities for surgery and curative-intent treatment."
He said the study included modeling suggesting that "a substantial shift toward earlier-stage diagnosis could improve projected survival," although he emphasized that this was not evidence that PANXEON could improve patient survival.
Goel also said that while the results are "very encouraging," they are "not a reason to begin population-wide screening or to change established clinical surveillance today," as prospective, longitudinal testing in high-risk individuals needs to be done next.
Der also said that if the cancer can be detected earlier, this would "improve patient survival by both impacting surgical and daraxonrasib treatment success," as to date, only approximately 15 percent of patients are eligible for surgery, which he said was "the only true potential cure," and so he said this test could "greatly increase the number of patients eligible for surgery."
Dr. Peter Allen, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Duke Cancer Center, North Carolina, told Newsweek that the test could also have the potential to "improve our ability to monitor response to therapy," but added that more "extensive testing" was needed.
Reference
Xu, C., Mannucci, A., Han, H. et al. (2026) Liquid biopsy for early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Nature Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04625-x
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Kara Dolman and Emma Lee-Sang
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