--- title: Lung Cancer Screening Can Catch Tumors When They're Curable, New Research Finds description: New research shows that lung cancer screening can increase patients' odds of surviving the disease. canonical: https://time.com/6236236/lung-cancer-screening-saves-lives/ author: Tara Law article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-11-28T16:07:53.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:31.251Z article:section: Health og:title: Lung Cancer Screening Can Catch Tumors When They're Curable, New Research Finds og:description: New research shows that lung cancer screening can increase patients' odds of surviving the disease og:url: https://time.com/6236236/lung-cancer-screening-saves-lives/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf58b3a361655d8f7/698a383d09208f6f88419e0b/Abstract-lungs.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2121 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: lung-scan og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Lung Cancer Screening Can Catch Tumors When They're Curable, New Research Finds twitter:description: New research shows that lung cancer screening can increase patients' odds of surviving the disease twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf58b3a361655d8f7/698a383d09208f6f88419e0b/Abstract-lungs.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Lung Cancer Screening Can Catch Tumors When They're Curable, New Research Finds > Sponsored content. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=e122d8dc-f01e-404c-89eb-5973f44a9d23&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer [Watch (HLS stream): The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W5jcvwLu.m3u8) (8:09)  _Published 2022-10-05. Scientists believe there is a future in which women can be vaccinated against breast cancer._  by [Tara Law](https://time.com/author/tara-law/)  ## Tara Law Nov 28, 2022 4:07 PM UTC  Abstract plexus lung on a black background. Abstract plexus lung on a black background. Yuichiro Chino—Getty Images  by [Tara Law](https://time.com/author/tara-law/)  ## Tara Law Nov 28, 2022 4:07 PM UTC For the past six years, Elyssa Barbaro has gotten screened for [lung cancer](https://time.com/5396246/global-cancer-burden/). The 71-year-old New Yorker [smoked](https://time.com/4590517/smoking-death-lung-cancer/) for about 50 years, but she doubts she would have gotten an annual preventative CT scan if her pulmonologist hadn’t told her she should. Even though the procedure takes just 15 minutes, it saved her life—more than once. During her CT scans in 2019 and 2020, cancer was discovered in Barbaro’s lungs. At first, Barbaro was terrified to learn that she had cancer. But because her doctors had checked her lungs annually, and then every six months after her diagnoses, they were able to [find the nodules](https://time.com/5486981/ruth-bader-ginsburg-lung-nodules/) soon after they started growing, when they were still very small. This meant the cancer could be easily removed by surgery, and that she didn’t need aggressive (and often painful) procedures to contain it, like chemotherapy and radiation. Now, Barbaro urges her friends who currently or formerly smoke to get screened. “I know people are afraid to find out they have something wrong with them,” says Barbaro. “But for me, the far greater fear is not knowing you have something wrong with you.” Lung cancer is the [leading cause of cancer deaths](https://time.com/3694662/lung-cancer-breast-cancer/), and one reason why is that many patients don’t experience symptoms until the disease becomes advanced. In the U.S., only [18.6%](https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/lung-cancer/resource-library/lung-cancer-fact-sheet) of all lung cancer patients survive for five years, since just 16% of lung cancers are diagnosed at an early stage. But more widespread screening can significantly improve people’s odds of lung cancer survival, new research finds. In [research](https://press.rsna.org/pressrelease/2022%5Fresources/2380/abstract.pdf) presented at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting on Nov. 27, an international team of researchers screened more than 87,000 participants, including Barbaro, with varying levels of risk for lung cancer. The screenings were conducted at least annually at more than 80 institutions around the world. Those who were screened yearly had a significantly reduced risk of dying from lung cancer; in more than 80% of cases, the cancer was detected early. Among 1,285 patients who were diagnosed with lung cancer, their survival rate was 80% over 20 years. And 92% of patients who had the earliest stage lung cancer survived for at least 20 years. --- ### More from TIME --- **Read More**: [_How AI Is Changing Medical Imaging to Improve Patient Care_](https://time.com/6227623/ai-medical-imaging-radiology/) This research adds to a growing body of evidence that lung-cancer screening saves lives. Under the [current recommendations](https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/lung-cancer-screening) of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF)—an independent body that reviews hundreds of studies on preventing and screening for different conditions—people ages 50 to 80 with a 20 “pack-year” [smoking history](https://time.com/3921149/cancer-smoking-lung-cancer/) (calculated by multiplying the number of cigarette packs smoked per day by the years a person smoked) should get screened annually. So should people in that age range who currently smoke or have quit within the past 15 years. “Lung cancer screening helps people live longer and healthier, because it catches lung cancer at an earlier, more treatable stage,” says Dr. John Wong, professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and a member of USPSTF. (Wong was not involved in the new study.) Despite these benefits, most eligible people don’t get screened. A 2017 [study](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6908a1.htm) published in 2020 found that only about 12% of people recommended under the USPSTF criteria at the time had been scanned for lung cancer over the last 12 months. As a result, many lung cancer cases are diagnosed at a late stage, when treatment options are fewer or none. That’s part of the reason why the authors of the new study wanted to conduct this research, says Dr. Claudia Henschke, director of the Early Lung and Cardiac Action Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and the lead author of the study. “The message hasn’t gotten out there enough to people who are at risk for lung cancer: that they can be cured,” says Henschke. “Coming back for the annual screening year after year is important.” Lung-cancer patients often do not experience symptoms right away because at the early stages, the cancer is too small to cause noticeable symptoms, says Dr. Michael Nissenblatt, an oncologist in New Jersey (who was not involved in the study). For instance, patients don’t start to feel pain until the cancer expands to the surface of the lung, where it can scratch against the walls of the chest. “Early stage lung cancer without screening simply won’t be discovered,” he says, unless a doctor catches it in a test for another illness. Over the last few decades, says Nissenblatt, doctors have made major strides to treat lung cancer. In recent years, more patients are surviving stage three and four lung cancers thanks to [advancements in therapies](https://time.com/5239920/immune-treatments-for-lung-cancer/), including a new course of treatment that follows a year of chemotherapy and radiation with a medicine called durvalumab. However, even with this treatment, Nissenblatt notes, more than half of people with stage three lung cancer die within five years. In this area, “we’ve made progress, but not so much,” he says. Scientific advances in surgical techniques have also made treatment for early-stage lung cancer easier. While 20 years ago patients had to remain in the hospital for 10 days after surgery, he says, the newest procedures enable patients to leave the hospital the same day or the following morning. “It becomes no more of a problem than removing a gallbladder or removing an appendix,” he says. For patients who fit a certain profile, the choice to screen is clear, Nissenblatt says. “The earlier the diagnosis,” he says, “the greater the opportunity we will have to cure you.” ## Transcript Vaccines are often called The Miracle of modern medicine for their ability to Target the immune system against disease-causing, viruses and bacteria. Since they work against infectious diseases, why not against other conditions that have long plagued Humanity like cancer. To say we're working to develop a vaccine to prevent Cancers and individuals for the rest of your life. It sounds like Star Wars but it's not a concept that's totally unchartered me vaccines against human papillomavirus which is causative agent in certain types of human cancers. Work to prevent cancer in those individuals who get vaccinated and so are we? We no longer is nikoli more about the immune system in the last 20 years in the face of cancer. Studies and cancer. And now it's covid that we can bring this knowledge to this big goal of using a new system to prevent all types of cancers and and do so with humility and optimize the immune response against cancer by training cells to recognize tumors as foreign. Once that happens in breast cancer, it may be possible to not only prevent Prince's in people who have already had cancer, but to even prevent it in the first place, I was diagnosed in 1987 and I wasn't treated much differently from what the treatments or today. Oh, wow. Yes, there's a lot of focus on immunotherapy and that's exciting. It's exciting from a research perspective but it hasn't really made a difference in women's lives. Yet, we believe that a vaccine approach is certainly the key and primary prevention or preventing people from getting breast cancer to begin with because we believe that that is the future, that that is one of the areas that we should be focusing on now. We believe not only will it save lives, but it will also be less toxic than existing Therapies. You know, technologies that have have been developed over the past five to ten years. Are number one, immune checkpoint Inhibitors. So, immune checkpoint Inhibitors is a form of therapy that has been you know now approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in targeting a number of different cancers were, we had has been effective lasso in in certain tumors. And so, the reason that vaccines don't work against metastatic deposits of tumor is because the tumors themselves. Throw up a number of Walls that ultimately prevents the immune response from acting and killing the tumor. So the whole idea just like an infectious disease, vaccine used to identify what's foreign in the tumor as much as possible and to really craft A vaccine that targets what's foreign because that's really word. You know we're going to see the power of the immune response and in shrinking or preventing a cancer is having multiple targets within the tumor. But also having them be very foreign at the Mayo. Clinic Newton has developed a vaccine targeting, a very early form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma inside you or DC, is he is working with his colleague dr. Amy degnan to test that vaccine experts, have debated in recent years, whether dcis is actually cancer since it involves lesions that remain in the ducts of the breast tissue and don't spread throughout the breast as other forms of breast cancer. Do about 50 1,000 women. A year are diagnosed with DC is in the US and some of those cases will become cancerous. Although doctors, can't predict which one As a result many women with the condition up to have radiation and surgery to remove the lesions to avoid the risk of developing cancer. if the immune system could be trained to attack tcis instead that would potentially help women to avoid the more invasive treatments, which some experts believe might be over treating their condition We are interested in pushing forward, you know, toward a goal of vaccines for breast cancer prevention. And so one strategy to do that is to then evaluate a vaccine that we found was safe and women who had invasive cancer and apply it to women who don't have invasive cancer yet who have this dcis and evaluate what kind of immune response we see in those women. And one of the things that were specifically interested in this study to see is what kind of response do we see in the breast tissue after this vaccine is given, can we find evidence that the immune system is reacting to the vaccine and potentially, you know, trying to clear out these cancer cells in the breast tissue. So, in this trial, we give the vaccine for several doses of the vaccine before surgery, and women who have dcis. And then at the time of We're removing their dcis as we would not normally to treat it, but we're also able to then investigate the breast tissue and the area of DCs and and see what is happening with the immune response there after the vaccine, the team at the Abramson Cancer Center, at Penn Medicine, is studying a different approach to a breast cancer vaccine. They are currently a rolling about 16th bull who have been diagnosed with cancer and who have the genetic mutations, bcra one or bcra to which put them at higher risk of developing breast cancer to see if vaccinating them will lower their chance of recurrence. The researchers also had to study a couple dozen people with the genetic risk, but who has not yet been diagnosed with cancer to see if the vaccine could lower their risk of ever developing the disease. It's a, it's a game changer and we recognize that we have a ways to go. But right now, if you're a 25 year old woman who has undergone genetic testing and is told that you have a safe for me to yishun, you're talkin about raining for the rest of your life for your breasts or deciding to do a bilateral, mastectomy have your breasts removed and at this point we had no effective screening for ovarian cancer. And so we strongly recommend that individuals have their ovaries removed between ages, 35 and 44 a beer, signaling carrier, putting them into early menopause. And with all the attendant Dallas ring consequence that we really have not had great options apart from surgical options. And, you know, we're working on many different types of strategies to try alternative National the natural history. But this concept of immune interception being able to use the immune system to change the natural history for these individual is so critical. We are probably at the end of the era of using cancer, vaccines with great hope in a patient, whose party been treated with everything in the tumor is still Advanced to using these vaccines and all our new knowledge in patients, who are at risk for relapse or individuals who are simply a high risk for cancer and we want to prevent so prevention. 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