All Lotions not Created Equally

Ivanhoe Newswire
Thursday, December 28, 2006; 12:00 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- If doctors knew which breast cancers were going to spread to other parts of the body and which werent, they could offer aggressive treatment to women who needed it and spare women who didnt the time and troublesome side effects associated with the therapy.

Unfortunately, there just isnt a good way for doctors to tell which cancers will spread and which wont, so most women undergo surgical removal of the lymph nodes to find out. If a new discovery by California researchers is borne out by further study, that may soon change.

Theyre hot on the trail of two proteins found in the original tumor that may predict whether the cancer has -- or will -- spread or not.

The study involved 65 patients who underwent standard lymph node biopsies to test for spread of the disease. Those results were compared to protein peaks found in an analysis of the original tumors. Two protein peaks -- one of which was over-expressed in the spreading cases and one of which was under expressed -- were 88 percent accurate in separating the spreading cancers from the non-spreading.

"We want to be able to predict, at the earliest stages, if a tumor has spread and how dangerous it will be," reports study author Dave S. B. Hoon, M.Sc., Ph.D., director of molecular oncology at the John Wayne Cancer Institute, Saint Johns Health Center, in Santa Monica, Calif. "These two proteins may allow us to target aggressive tumors with more extensive therapy management to some women, while sparing others from needless treatment."

The research is only in the early stages right now, so the investigators have yet to actually identify the two proteins involved, but they hope to find out soon through additional studies.

This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.

SOURCE: Cancer Research, published online Dec. 15, 2006