Research collaboration seeks blood test for aggressive breast cancer

The clinical sample collection is one key to the project's success, the researchers say. The samples follow the course of the disease, which is one of the best ways to track the growth and spread of cancer, says Mural. Blood samples have been collected before and after surgical treatment, and workers gather the clinical and family histories from the women. Pathologists examine the cancer tissue and the samples are handled and stored under strict protocols, Mural says.

The team will compare the proteins of cancers that stayed in the breast to cancers that spread to lymph nodes, which the scientists hope will reveal proteins that metastasizing tumors use to make their way through the body. The team will also compare diseased tissues from pre- and post-menopausal women. This will ferret out proteins from cancers that hit young women, which are generally more life-threatening than disease that shows up in the years after menopause.

To avoid complications from healthy tissue, Mural's team at Windber will use lasers to carefully snip the cancerous cells from the surrounding breast tissue, and then send the cancer cells to Smith and Rodland for proteomics analysis at the DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus. Cutting away the healthy tissue will result in very small samples, but EMSL is set up to study samples that are up to a thousand times smaller than other labs, says Smith.

"PNNL's tissue proteomics is at the cutting edge of the technology," says Mural. "What they can do isn't happening elsewhere."

Rodland says the task is daunting because the biomarkers are at very low concentrations and are hidden in the noise of thousands of proteins. Smith adds that PNNL's methods and instruments can identify many more proteins and allow samples from more patients to be analyzed than other labs.

After identifying proteins that might qualify as biomarkers, the researchers will scour the blood samples to determine whether the proteins are there as well as in the tissue, and ensure that the proteins only show up in the blood samples of women who had aggressive cancer. At the end of two years, the researchers expect to have a handful of biomarkers that can then be tested in women newly diagnosed with breast cancer.

The views expressed in this news release are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of Army, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government. The study was sponsored by the Clinical Breast Care Project through a Congressional Grant [W81XWH-05-2-0053].

The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory is a national scientific user facility sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

PNNL is a DOE Office of Science national laboratory that solves complex problems in energy, national security and the environment, and advances scientific frontiers in the chemical, biological, materials, environmental and computational sciences. PNNL employs 4,000 staff, has a $760 million annual budget, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965.