A newly introduced blood test is twice as sensitive and can detect breast cancer recurrence a full year earlier than current blood tests.

Currently available blood tests are not very sensitive and the best-known test for a biological "marker" protein, misses many cases of recurrence and detects them late, often after symptoms surface.

A team of scientists at Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN, USA) analyzed many hundreds of "metabolites" in the blood of breast cancer survivors. Metabolites are small molecules, biological byproducts formed as the body's cells go about the business of life, and some are released into the bloodstream and urine. The markers are detected with an instrument called a mass spectrometer (MS), which is common in clinical laboratories.

These markers would be used in combination with results from breast carcinoma antigen CA 27.29 blood tests. The investigators have found that combining MS and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) methods improves the ability to perform global metabolite profiling, and has revealed a set of biomarkers that are very sensitive and specific for detecting early breast cancer recurrence. The derived metabolite profile is twice as sensitive as the CA 27.29 assay, and detects recurrence 12 months earlier. The profile has been ported to a single MS platform and validated using an independent set of approximately 100 patient samples.

Daniel Raftery, PhD, the team leader said, "We take both of those results together and roll those into the profile so that the score we generate is a combination of the CA value and our nine metabolites. If the score indicates that the cancer probably has returned, the patient would then likely undergo imaging tests to locate the tumor." Dr. Raftery hopes that the new test will become available later this year. In the meantime, the scientists are conducting another clinical study with the test. In the future, the test might be useful in the early detection of breast cancer, not just recurrences. A commercial company called Matrix-Bio (West Lafayette, IN, USA) has been set up to develop the assay. The results of the study were present at the 243rd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society, held March 25-29, 2012, in San Diego, CA, USA.

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