Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths, because ~84% of cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage. Worldwide in 2008, ~1.5 million people were diagnosed and ~1.3 million died – a survival rate unchanged since 1960. However, patients diagnosed at an early stage and have surgery experience an 86% overall 5-year survival. New diagnostics are therefore needed to identify lung cancer at this stage. Here we present the first large scale clinical use of aptamers to discover blood protein biomarkers in disease with our breakthrough proteomic technology. This multi-center case-control study was conducted in archived samples from 1,326 subjects from four independent studies of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in long-term tobacco-exposed... |