Serum Protein Biomarkers Detect Invasive Breast Cancer

The ability of serum protein biomarkers in conjunction with autoantibodies to distinguish between invasive breast cancer and benign breast conditions has been demonstrated.

It has been estimated that 233,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the USA in 2014 and approximately 40,000 deaths occur from breast cancer each year. While biomarkers are often used to augment detection of various cancers, definitive biomarkers for breast cancer have remained elusive.


Data is now available from a study that measured serum protein biomarkers (SPBs) known to be associated with breast cancer in over 163 serum samples from women with either breast cancer or benign breast conditions. In addition, 28 autoantibodies (AAbs) associated with cancer were analyzed in 31 of these patients. The study demonstrated that the addition of AAbs to a panel of SPBs greatly increases accuracy and using SPBs to distinguish benign from invasive breast cancer yields reasonable but non-clinically meaningful results in menopausal women.

Provista Diagnostics, Inc., (Scottsdale, AZ, USA) is a privately-held molecular diagnostics company focused on developing and commercializing proprietary blood-based diagnostic, prognostic and monitoring tests for cancers affecting women, that announced the data highlighting Provista's proteomic diagnostic that measures multiple breast cancer-specific biomarker proteins in blood samples.

David Reese, PhD, president and CEO of Provista, said, “The presentation of this proof-of-concept data is a major milestone for Provista as we continue to advance the development of our robust pipeline to detect breast and gynecologic cancers in women. Accurate clinical diagnosis of breast cancer depends on the effective use of complementary technologies in conjunction with standard of care, such as imaging. We believe our proteomics approach, which combines the sensitivity of autoantibodies with the specificity of known serum protein biomarkers along with standard-of-care imaging, may reduce the number of missed actionable breast cancers while avoiding the stress and added diagnostic costs of false negative reports.” The study was presented at The American Society of Clinical Oncology's 2014 Breast Cancer Symposium (ASCO-Breast 2014) that took place from September 4-6, 2014, in San Francisco (CA, USA).

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