It might lead to a painless new diagnostic test to detect oral cancer. Screening of proteins in human saliva can accurately detect a common type of oral cancer.
The test predicts the mouth cancer in 93 percent of cases. The study has been published in the Journal Clinical Cancer Research by University of California.
It is among the first of a new set of spit-based a diagnostic tests expected to arise from a protein map of human saliva.
The protein map, published in March, identified all 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands. The latest findings focus on oral squamous cell carcinoma, which affects more than 300,000 people worldwide.
More than 90 percent of cancers that start in the mouth are squamous cell cancers.
The team is developing devices to detect these markers that could be studied in human trials.
