A new blood test is twice as sensitive and can detect breast cancer recurrence a full year earlier than current blood tests, according to Daniel Raftery, PhD, who reported on the test at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.
Research shows that early detection and treatment of cancer recurrence can save lives, and with 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States alone, testing is essential. However, currently available blood tests lack sensitivity. For instance, the biomarker test CA 27.29 allows many cases of recurrence to go unnoticed or identifies them too late.
“We have identified a group of 9 biomarkers that signal recurrence of breast cancer,” Raftery said. “Our markers detect twice as many recurrences as the CA marker does at the same specificity. They also detect cancer recurrence earlier, about 11-12 months sooner than existing tests. They accomplish this with blood samples, rather than biopsies, with less discomfort to patients.”
Raftery and colleagues at Purdue University and Matrix-Bio, Inc. examined many hundreds of metabolites in the blood of breast cancer survivors to find these 9 markers. As part of a rapidly emerging scientific field called “metabolite profiling,” this study sought to understand how these metabolites relate to breast cancer. Although many of Raftery’s biomarkers were already implicated with cancer, it was unknown that this group of metabolites could serve as biomarkers for breast cancer recurrence, he said.
The markers detected would be used in combination with results from CA 27.29 blood tests, said Raftery. “We take both of those results together and roll them into the profile so that the score we generate is a combination of the CA value and our 9 metabolites,” he said. “If the score indicates that the cancer probably has returned, the patient would then likely undergo imaging tests to locate the tumor.”
Source: ACS.
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