Study shows promising use of proteomics and bioinformatics in ovarian cancer detection.

2002 MAR 14 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Results of a study published in the The Lancet show that a new method of assessing protein patterns in blood samples was able to detect 100% of ovarian cancer cases, even at the elusive early stage when the cancer is most survivable.

In an analysis of 116 blinded blood samples - 50 from patients with cancer and 66 with nonmalignant disease - the researchers were able to correctly identify all 50 cases of ovarian cancer, including, most significantly, all 18 stage I cases. Of the controls, 63 of the 66 (95%) were identified as noncancer. This is a vast improvement over the currently used ovarian cancer detection technique of identifying the tumor marker CA125 combined with ultrasound.

The study was conducted by researchers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)/National Cancer Institute (NCI) Clinical Proteomics Program, Northwestern University Medical School, Unversity of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Correlogic Systems, Inc., the developer of the proprietary algorithms and processes that identified the protein patterns. It appeared in the February 16, 2002, issue.

"Our research provides us with very intriguing early results, and justifies us to expand our analysis to larger validation trials," said Emanuel Petricoin, PhD, lead author of the study and codirector of the Clinical Proteomics Program, a joint research and clinical program of the FDA and the NCI. "The concept ...