How to catch ovarian cancer sooner

Less than half of patients with ovarian cancer survive up to five years after diagnosis. According to the American Cancer Society, this is explained by the fact that only about one-fifth of ovarian cancer cases are screened early, when the chances of successful treatment and cure are maximum .

"If we could change this reality by detecting (ovarian cancer) at a curable stage, we could save many lives," said Keren Levanon, a medical researcher at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel.

In the newspaper Molecular and cellular proteomicsResearchers led by Levanon and Tamar Geiger of Tel Aviv University have announced a new test for ovarian cancer that surpbades previous tests. They hope this will help track down women who are genetically predisposed to the disease.

The researchers used proteomics to look for cancer signatures in the uterine fluid. They compared samples of women with ovarian cancer operated during treatment and volunteers who underwent gynecological surgery for reasons other than cancer, such as uterine fibroids or excessive bleeding. .

Body fluids contain many proteins. Strong signals from the most common proteins may mask signals from smaller amounts of cancer-related proteins that may also be present. To overcome this difficulty, the researchers isolated the microvesicles from the uterine fluid. Because the microvesicles are released from the cells, they contain almost no plasma proteins that mask the signal.

Using proteomics, researchers compared thousands of uterine microvesicula proteins from 12 healthy volunteers and 12 cancer patients. They then used machine learning algorithms to look for patterns to distinguish the samples.

"We have developed a diagnostic set of nine proteins that distinguishes women with ovarian cancer from healthy women, with greater sensitivity and specificity than previously reported," said Levanon.

The researchers then tested the accuracy of the set on a cohort of 152 women, 37 of whom had ovarian cancer. The test had a diagnostic sensitivity of 70%, which means that he had correctly detected the cancer. 25 of the 37 study participants who actually had cancer; and 76% specificity, which means that she correctly identified about three out of four healthy volunteers. It surpbaded previous proteomic-based tests, which had a sensitivity of less than 60%.

The authors suggest that their test could be useful for young women whose risk of developing ovarian cancer is known to be high. They also believe that the method of isolating microvesicles from body fluids to detect weaker cancer signals is promising for other types of cancer difficult to detect.

Provided by
American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology