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what if you could detect different types of cancers and other diseases from a single sample of blood ucla scientists say you can. they have developed a blood test that can analyze dna fragments circulating in the bloodstream and in early studies the test shows promise in detecting multiple. answers, liver conditions and organ abnormalities joining us now is nbc news medical contributor dr john torez. dr john, this almost sounds too good to be true. how does the test work? how reliable is it? you're right, this is almost becoming science fiction, turning into science here, and it does seem too good to be true. but i think we're very close to getting this where it is what we call prime time it's ready for everybody to use now this test. this test is what they call methylation test. so instead of other cancer tests that look at dna of the cancer, this looks at different chemical markers of the cancer tumor itself. what they found out in the studies is that when they end up looking at this 9th % sensitive or specificity meaning that they had very. very low amounts of false positives they ended up having those detection rates you saw there 63% across the board for liver, stomach, lung and ovarian cancers, which are the they looked at for different stages of the cancer and for early stages of the cancer 55 %, which is important, and then, when they switched de liver cancer to look at it, those numbers became even better at that 90% specificity, meaning very low number of false positives, 80% of those cancers were detected. so that's important because again, this is a screening test. you want to detect them as soon as possible so that where they can be treated more successfully, dr john, i can appreciate that maybe not everyone wants to know their risk of developing cancer. so who specifically is this recommended for? so right now they're still looking at who they want to determine. this is going to be used for, and again they looked at those 4 ones the liver, the stomach, ovarian and w lung cancer, and they're saying you know these are the ones they tested right now. but this should be available for other cancers as well, and so my thought is this is going to be for people that number one have family histories or personal histories of cancer is also going to be following up prognosis on cancer treatments, how those go along and how people are recovering from cancers. but studies will determine here who's eligible for what we can do with this and how ubiquitous this test can be, which i think it's going to be a fairly open test, and so we'll figure out over the years how many people can use this. well, so maybe you can't answer this either, but i was curious like how widely it might be available and where like would you get it from your general practitioner? do we have any idea? or is it just too soon to get to that now? in these tests usually we have tests that are similar to this right now, and a test like this is used to track liver cancer cases and to follow them as they go long. these tests are available at your doctor's office. you simply go in there, you get a test and send it off to the labs, and they get that analyzed. an oncologist, obviously, will be working with you as well to determine where you go with this cancer, but these are being used in this case. here they're looking at it being used as a screening test, meaning it's not not a standalone test it's a test that says yes, we need to do more tests to determine exact. eactly, what kind of cancer that says, exactly what kind of treatment you need. so this is not a step alone test. at this point, time will determine with the studies where we go with this. okay, so not yet a stand-alone test. but do we have any sense, dr john, of the cost and whether or not this could be covered by insurance? you know more than likely if this gets to the point where gets fda approved, insurances will start to cover this, because again, even for insurance perspectives earlier they detected cancer the easier it is to treat, which means it's also less costly to treat. but right now we don't know the full cost. if you look at tests that are similar to this, we're talking one $300 range for these tests, and so time will tell once we get closer to this being released. all right, dr john torres, for us, thanks so much, dr jam.