A specific gut microbiome signature may help identify pancreatic cancer early and serve as a prognostic marker, a study suggests.

Using patient saliva and stool samples, researchers found that it may be possible to spot the malignancy through a specific panel of microbes, regardless of the stage of disease.

“The way to a screening test to be used in the clinic is still far off; however, we took some care to vet our microbiome models towards disease specificity,” said study co-author Dr Thomas Schmidt (PhD), from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.

“Test specificity in particular has been an issue with previous efforts, and also for microbiome signatures in other diseases where very few associations have proven to generalise beyond initial studies.”