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Research will Help Develop Simple Blood Test for Early Detection

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Researchers at the University of Arkansas are building a library of synthetically produced antibodies that can detect and rapidly validate proteins secreted by breast cancer cells. Their work will accelerate the process of developing a simple blood test for early detection of breast cancer.

“We want to implement a rapid screen that is sensitive – meaning highly accurate – non-invasive and inexpensive,” said Shannon Servoss, assistant professor of chemical engineering. “Such a test would be easy to use – as easy as a pregnancy test – and applicable to women of all ages, races and ethnicities. The ultimate goal, of course, is early detection of breast cancer.”

Researchers currently use specific protein binders called affinity reagents, which are molecules that interact with proteins, to recognize and validate proteins that indicate breast cancer. But this process is tedious and problematic because there are a limited number of affinity reagents available, and techniques to develop them are slow and expensive.

Servoss’s team seeks to overcome these obstacles by developing a collection of affitoids, which are synthetic, peptoid-based affinity reagents. A library of these affitoids, which are inexpensive and easy to make, will facilitate the development of techniques for protein validation.

The affitoids have other advantages. They can be designed to have desired properties, such as structural stability and specificity for a single protein. They also do not have to be limited to breast cancer detection. They could be designed to detect other complex diseases.

“This technique is superior to those currently available because affitoids specific for proteins secreted by breast cancer cells can be rapidly selected from a large collection, which isn’t too expensive to build,” Servoss said. “The selected affitoids will be used to determine a profile – a protein fingerprint – that indicates breast cancer. Of course, all of this is happening at the cell level, before the tumor is detectable.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year more than 40,000 women die due to breast cancer, and approximately 200,000 women are diagnosed with the disease. Early diagnosis leads to decreased mortality rates and allows for many more treatment options.

“It is imaginable that in this generation, a simple blood test could detect breast cancer at early stages and save thousands of lives,” Servoss said. (source newswire.uark.edu)

New research led by investigators at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) sheds light on a genetic function that gives breast cancer cells the ability to survive and spread to the bone years after treatment has been administered. The findings support the study of therapies that target this survival capacity and force the death of latent breast cancer cells before they get a chance to metastasize, or spread – a problem that accounts for a majority of breast cancer-related deaths. The research will be published in the July 7 issue of Cancer Cell.

“Our results should encourage oncologists to consider the study of Src inhibitors to attack reservoirs of disseminated, latent cancer cells and prevent metastasis in breast cancer patients after their tumor has been removed.”

Using gene-expression profiling techniques, researchers found that breast cancer cells that infiltrate the bone marrow can survive over time if they contain the gene product Src, which has known effects on cell mobility, invasion, and survival. The investigators discovered that genetically disabling Src activity in human breast cancer cells inhibits these cells from surviving in the bone marrow and forming metastases in mice. They also observed that treatment with the drug dasatinib inhibits the formation of bone metastasis by human breast cancer cells inoculated into mice.

“Our results should encourage oncologists to consider the study of Src inhibitors to attack reservoirs of disseminated, latent cancer cells and prevent metastasis in breast cancer patients after their tumor has been removed,” said the study’s senior author, Joan Massagué, PhD, Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at MSKCC and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Breast tumors may shed cancer cells from the outset, and some of these cells may infiltrate vital organs, including the bones, lungs, and brain. When a tumor is diagnosed and removed, chemotherapy is administered with the goal of eliminating these residual cancer cells. However, metastasis may still emerge in some patients and may take years or decades to occur, suggesting that these cells may not inherently possess – and need some time to acquire – all of the molecular characteristics needed to metastasize.

According to the study, nearly one-third of cases of breast cancer relapse emerge three or more years after diagnosis, with some cases developing decades later. At present, the major clinical benefits from postoperative drug therapies are observed in the first few years after treatment, which may mean that latent cancer cells are at least partially resistant to conventional therapy.
(source mskcc.org)