Unfortunately, only 50 percent of breast cancers are localized at the time of diagnosis, in part, due to the quality of the tools used to screen for breast cancer. For example, the effectiveness of mammography is still being debated, while serum-based tumor markers still lack adequate sensitivity and specificity for detecting early stage carcinoma.
Identification of disease-associated proteins could be a solution for early detection of breast cancers. However, scientists have found that some technologies for protein identification are too labor intensive and are not effective as a diagnostic tool (polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis), while others experience signal background problems which precluded their use as a high-throughput screening tool for protein analysis (matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry).
A team of researchers have now set out to examine whether surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI) may be a practical and effective method for identifying potential biomarkers of early stage breast cancer. The authors of Identification of Serum Biomarkers to Detect Breast Cancer Using Proteomics and Bioinformatics Approaches, are Jinong Li, Zhen Zhang, Jason Rosenzweig, Young Y. Wang, and Daniel W. Chan, all from the Department of Pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Md.
The researchers study appears in the August edition of Clinical Chemistry, the scientific journal of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC). Publication was timed to coincide with the organizations 54th Annual Meeting, which
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Contact: Donna J. Krupa
djkrupa1@aol.com
407-685-4215
American Association for Clinical Chemistry
29-Jul-2002