Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine want to make cancer screenings as easy as drawing blood and have developed a promising method.

Reported by Medical News Today, the researchers have published a study in the journal Nature Medicine detailing how to search for DNA from cancer tumors in the bloodstream. If successful, the study authors believe the blood testing detection method will be more accurate in covering several different types of cancer.

"We set out to develop a method that overcomes two major hurdles in the circulating tumor DNA field," study co-author Dr. Maximilian Diehn, assistant professor of radiation oncology, said in a press release. "First, the technique needs to be very sensitive to detect the very small amounts of tumor DNA present in the blood. Second, to be clinically useful it's necessary to have a test that works off the shelf for the majority of patients with a given cancer."

Previous studies have attempted to make cancer screenings more sensitive to detecting the various forms of cancer. This new method has shown promise in eliminating the tedious process those previous studies have posed.

"We're trying to develop a general method to detect and measure disease burden," study co-author Dr. Ash Alizadeh, a hematologist and oncologist, said in the release. "Blood cancers like leukemias can be easier to monitor than solid tumors through ease of access to the blood. By developing a general method for monitoring circulating tumor DNA, we're in effect trying to transform solid tumors into liquid tumors that can be detected and tracked more easily."

Doctors Aaron Newman and Scott Bratman, postdoctoral scholars, co-led the study. Newman said patient-specific screenings are the way of the future for cancer testing.

"A key advantage of our approach is that we can also track many different classes of mutations, and integrate information from all of them to get a much stronger signal," Newman said in the release. "We've also developed statistical methods to suppress the background noise in a sample. This allows us to identify even very minute quantities of cancer DNA in a blood sample."