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Researchers at Yale University have been working on creating a unique blood test for ovarian cancer. Their test will be able to accomplish something that no other test has been able to do – spot the disease while it is in the early stages of development and has a chance being cured. For now the phase II study test has an accuracy of 99%.

A phase III trial is under way and should be completed within months, Yale School of Medicine researcher Gil Mor, MD, tells WebMD. Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the U.S., even though it is much less common than many other cancers. That is because the disease is most often diagnosed in its late stages when the cancer has already spread beyond the ovaries.

A reliable test for detecting ovarian cancer in its early stages has been an elusive goal, but the Yale researchers believe they may have one. And an independent review by the National Cancer Institute’s Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) confirmed their early findings. “We now have a test that is significantly better than anything that is available today,” Mor says.

The Yale researchers have now been asked to test stored samples from the huge NCI screening trial that began in 1993. Some of the samples will be from women who went on to develop ovarian cancer and some will be from women who did not, but the Yale team will not know which samples are which.

If the test can successfully differentiate between the two groups, it may be useful for identifying ovarian cancer in its pre-clinical stages, Srivastava says. “If this phase of the research succeeds, I would say this is going to be very close to what an ideal [ovarian cancer test] would be,” he adds.