The international team of researchers claims it could improve the ability to screen younger women who have limited success with mammograms, or breast X-rays, because their breast tissue is too dense.
Only women aged 50 and over are recruited into mammography programs because experts say there is not enough evidence the test is worth while in younger women.
Writing in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research, the overseas researchers said the new test could also be used to look for signs of other diseases including prostate, ovarian and melanoma cancers.
The research group, which includes scientists from University College London, the universities of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh and the biotechnology company BioTraces, tested 250 breast cancer patients by looking for antibody responses in their blood.
Lead scientist Jasminka Godovac-Zimmermann said the blood test was found to be up to 1000 times more sensitive than existing tests. It could detect cancers while they were still contained in the epithelial or surface cells. “Our pilot studies show that using blood samples, breast cancer and several other types of epithelial cancers can be detected with much better sensitivity and specificity,” Professor Godovac-Zimmermann said. “This may allow new, less intrusive, safer and much less expensive approaches for the early diagnosis of cancer, for distinguishing malignant and benign cancers and for monitoring cancer therapy.”
Cancer Council WA director of education and research Terry Slevin said there was no doubt there was a huge potential market for simple blood tests that could help diagnose cancer early.
“There is a big push by the big biotech firms to find an early test, particularly for breast cancer, on the basis that there’s a whole bunch of cancer tests that we currently have that are a fair way from being perfect,” he said.
“There’s the need for an early test for diseases such as ovarian cancer and there’s obviously research like this under way to look at the markers. But even once you have a test you have to do a population-based trial and that can take a fair while because you’re looking to see if it reduces mortality and that might take more than 10 years.”
"Source":[ http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=27&ContentID=2387]
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