Parting the veil
For varieties of cancer that are rarely diagnosed before they reach an advanced, aggressive stage, the search for biomarkers can be particularly vexing. Without any physical symptoms to suggest that an individual may be developing a tumor, researchers are hard-pressed to know who should be screened for suspicious blood proteins, or, indeed, which proteins to screen for.
A key step toward a solution has come in pancreatic cancer, the fourth-leading cancer killer and a disease notorious for its ability to appear without warning. Since the initial phases of the disorder are usually veiled, Dana-Farber researchers have engineered a strain of mice that develop aggressive, fatal pancreatic cancer through the same genetic miscues that cause the disease in humans. Knowing the mice are likely to develop the cancer should help researchers find biomarkers in the blood or elsewhere that provide the first whispers of a tumor's presence.
"This model shows great promise as a platform for rapid and efficient testing of novel therapeutic agents and for the discovery of markers for each stage of tumor growth," says Dana-Farber's Ronald DePinho, MD, who has led the research with Nabeel Bardeesy, PhD, and graduate student Andrew Aguirre.
By comparing thousands of proteins in the blood of pancreatic cancer patients with proteins in the blood of mice with the disease, investigators zeroed in on a handful that could help identify patients more than a year before symptoms prompted a visit to their doctor. These proteins are now undergoing stringent clinical testing for potential use in people at high risk for the disease. Cross-species comparisons are now being used for many types of cancer.
