Spectrometry Tool May Detect Early Breast Cancer

The study was published in the August 2002 issue of Clinical Chemistry.

Researchers from the pathology department of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (Baltimore, MD, USA) obtained 160 serum samples from the institution's serum banks. The cancer group consisted of 103 serum samples from breast cancer patients at different clinical stages, 41 control samples from women who were free of cancer, and 25 women with benign breast disease. Diluted serum samples were applied to a protein chip, and complex proteins from different diagnostic groups were profiled and analyzed.

The researchers selected three biomarkers based on their collective contribution to the statistically significant separation between stages 0-1 breast cancer patients and noncancer controls. This same separation was observed with independent test data of patients with stage II and stage III breast cancer. A cross-validation of the data, derived, by multivariate logistic regression, showed a method sensitivity of 93% for all cancer patients and a specificity of 91% for the control group.

The authors say this high sensitivity and specificity are evidence that SELDI mass spectrometry could lead to the discovery of additional biomarkers that would indicate early-stage breast cancer and fill a gap now existing in breast cancer detection.




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