Early Stage Ovarian Cancer Detected With 99% Accuracy

A blood test has been developed with enough sensitivity and specificity to detect early stage ovarian cancer with 99% accuracy.

Epithelial ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecologic cancer deaths in the United States and three times more lethal than breast cancer. The cancer, which came to be known as a silent killer, is usually not diagnosed until its advanced stages.

The results build on work done in 2005 by Dr. Gil Mor, associate professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale University (New Haven, CT, USA) and colleagues, which showed 95% effectiveness of a blood test for early ovarian cancer. Now, Dr. Mor used a new platform called multiplex technology to simplify the previous test into one single reaction using very small amounts of serum. The new platform uses six protein biomarkers instead of four, increasing the specificity of the test from 95-99.4%. The team looked for the presence of specific proteins and quantified the concentration of those proteins in blood.

"This is the most sensitive and specific test currently available,” said Dr. Mor. "Previous tests recognized 15 to 20% of new tumors. Proteins from the tumors were the only biomarkers used to test for ovarian cancer. That is okay when you have big masses of tumors, but it is not applicable in very early phases of the tumor. Testing the proteins produced by the body in response to the presence of the tumor as well as the proteins the tumors produce, helped us to create a unique picture that can detect early ovarian cancer. The ability to recognize almost 100% of new tumors will have a major impact on the high death rates of this cancer. We hope this test will become the standard of care for women having routine examinations. The test is available at Yale through the Discovery to Cure program.

Results of the new study were published in the February 2007 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research.


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