Soon, a simple saliva test could help find many diseases, including cancer. Researchers hope saliva diagnostics will change how early diagnosis and health tracking are done.
(Photo: Getty Images/ Sbastien Bozon)
A New Step Forward in Precision Medicine
The director of the UCLA Center for Oral/Head & Neck Oncology Research (COOR), David T.W. Wong, thinks that saliva diagnostics could change how precision and personalized treatment are done. Wong told MDLinx that it is now possible to use these body parts, which he called "omics constituents circulating in body fluids," to monitor health and find diseases.
Wong's lab is the leader in this area, and their goal is to make simple tests that can find diseases early, like lung cancer.
Our bodies produce 0.5 to 1.5 liters of spit every day. This saliva contains several biomarkers, including proteins, antibodies, viruses, bacteria, DNA, mRNA, and tumor indicators.
The FDA has granted special approval for saliva tests to detect COVID-19, demonstrating how useful saliva is for illness diagnosis. Dr. Wong said that COVID had raised saliva levels in global molecular testing. The pathogen SARS-CoV-2 shows up in saliva similarly to blood, he said, and he stressed that it could be found in saliva with results comparable to nose swabs and often show that saliva is just as good as or better than nasal swabs.
Diagnostics based on saliva have many perks, including being easy to get to, not invasive, and more acceptable to patients. Dr. Wong says that saliva diagnostic testing doesn't hurt or embarrass the tested person; it just gets to the oral area. In his talk, he said that his lab has been studying how to find signs of lung cancer in saliva, which works better than blood tests.
Other Studies on Saliva as a Cancer Detector
Researchers at Sweden's University of Gothenburg have made significant progress toward developing a cancer-detecting saliva test using artificial intelligence (AI). They discovered changes in the structure of glycans, complex sugar molecules prevalent in cancer cells' proteins.
This can help doctors determine a person's type of cancer. Daniel Bojar, who led the study, talked about how AI helped him analyze a lot of data to find a link between glycans and cancer, which made it possible to make a diagnostic saliva test.
Bojar's group looked at information from around 220 people who had 11 types of cancer, such as skin, stomach, liver, prostate, colon, and ovarian. This study aims to create a non-invasive diagnostic tool that could be used all the time to find diseases before they show signs that require more invasive tests.
Glycans are released by cancer cells and help the tumor grow. They can be tracked without biopsies. Swedish researchers want to expand their work to include glycans in lung cancer tests, which could completely change how early cancer is found.
In the past few years, saliva tests have become more popular, especially for finding mouth and throat cancers. A U.S. company called Viome created a method approved by the FDA quickly in 2021. It uses AI to look at spit samples for changes in messenger RNA in mouth bacteria when tumors grow.
Diagnostics that use spit to find systemic diseases are still in their early stages, but the field of liquid biopsy is growing quickly. Dr. Wong said that liquid biopsy is in its early stages but can potentially significantly affect medicine. He told them how important they were to move this field forward and how saliva could be at the head of this new frontier.
As studies continue, saliva diagnostics are more likely to become a useful early disease detection tool. This would make healthcare less invasive and easier to obtain.
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