By Allison Takeda
Scientists at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine are working to develop a test that can detect a breast cancer "fingerprint" in a single droplet of blood, thus reducing our dependence on mammography.
Screening for breast cancer has been the subject of some controversy in recent years, but if new research holds up, the mammogram debate could be a thing of the past in the not-so-distant future.
Researchers from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine are working to develop a new blood test that could someday reduce our dependence on mammography and change the way we diagnose breast cancer and other diseases.
The Future of Cancer Screening?
Collaborating with teams from McGill’s Goodman Cancer Research Centre, Juncker’s biomedical group next used the test to measure the profile of 32 specific proteins in the blood of 28 individuals, 17 of whom had a particular type of breast cancer. From these 32 proteins, the researchers were able to identify a subset of six that were specific to the patients with cancer and could be used to establish a so-called “fingerprint” for the disease.
“While this study needs to be repeated with additional markers and a greater diversity of patients and cancer subsets before such a test can be applied to clinical diagnosis, these results nonetheless underscore the exciting potential of this new technology,” Juncker said.
In particular, Juncker and his team hope to develop a handheld version of the test that can be used in a physician’s office using a single droplet of blood to detect breast cancer and other diseases at the earliest possible stage — and without the cost, inconvenience, or risk sometimes associated with mammograms.
2 comments:
Wow...cancer certainly hasn't affected your brain cells! Very impressive! (Now if they could just find a cure.)
Sounds promising! How wonderful this would be.
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