Beyond Mammography
Searching for breast cancer biomarkers
Robotic lab tools speed efforts by Alexander Miron, PhD, to discover telltale breast cancer proteins in the bloodstream.
To women fearing breast cancer, better method for detecting the disease when it's easily curable would be cause for dancing in the streets. Regular mammography is the most effective breast cancer screening test in use today, and it undoubtedly helps save lives. But even though this century-old X-ray technology is constantly improving, it still isn't sensitive or specific enough for true early detection.
Mammograms miss more than 10 percent of breast cancers and often fail to detect small tumors in younger women, whose breasts contain denser tissue. On the other hand, they can create needless anxiety because they .nd many lesions that prove benign after a biopsy.
"Mammography is the best tool we have today, but it has tremendous limitations," says Eric Winer, MD, director of the Breast Oncology Center at Dana-Farber.
In some cases, advanced imaging methods such as ultrasound, MRI, and scans with radioactive tracers can improve sensitivity, but they're not suited for screening large, healthy populations. Understandably, women are demanding something better.
Scientists at Dana-Farber are heeding this call. Recognizing the inherent limitations of imaging tumors inside the breast, they are exploring more sophisticated ways of detecting early cancers.
Thanks to new molecular tools, warning signs of breast cancer may someday be as easy to obtain as a drop of a woman's blood. The researchers are hunting molecules in the bloodstream released by cancer cells or by the reaction of the body's immune system to reveal the presence of disease.
Thanks to new molecular tools, warning signs of breast cancer may someday be as easy to obtain as a drop of a woman's blood.
These biochemical red flags, known as "biomarkers," have huge potential advantages over mammograms. With noninvasive blood tests, healthy women at risk for breast cancer could be watched for the first signs of normal cells turning cancerous. Biomarkers associated with different cancer types could help refine the diagnosis. In addition, physicians might be able to compare a tumor's activity pattern before and after treatment to monitor the effect of therapy.
The hunt for cancer biomarkers more than 20 years old and is quickening as technologies for mounting these needle-in-a-haystack searches improve. Reflecting this, the National Cancer Institute funds a national biomarker development effort called the Early Detection Research Network.
- Next: "Fingerprints" of cancer
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