The earlier the cancer is diagnosed, the better the chances of successful treatment. Pancreatic cancer, for example, is one of the most deadly cancers. Doctors rarely detect a tumor before it causes symptoms, and in the meantime, it has spread to other tissues. Of the few patients diagnosed before the cancer spread, the five-year survival rate was about 60%; if not, the survival rate is less than 5%.
Drs. Andrew Lowy, clinical director of Cancer Surgery at UC San Diego School, explains Dr. Andrew Lowy, Dr. Medicine. "Pancreatic cancer is known to be very difficult to detect early, in a stage where surgical resection, which is the only treatment option, is possible."
Lowy and his colleagues are determined to build a novel test site for cancer early detection. Their method, recently published in Nature Communications Medicine, revealed more than 95% of early pancreas cancers. Their strategy was to break into the network of communication between the cell phones.
Extracellular vesicles: Package in an intercellular communication network
Over the past few decades, cancer researchers have identified dozens of cancer-related biomarkers that contribute to cancer growth and survival. These findings have led to the development of powerful drugs for the treatment of cancer. Researchers at UCSD suspect that these molecules may be used to detect cancer early. Unfortunately, these molecules are hard to find.
Multi-cancer cancer screening (MCDTs) involves testing for blood proteins or nucleic acids that are indicative of cancer. Several MCD tests have shown promise for early-stage cancer detection. Catching first-line cancer, however, proves to be a huge challenge. During the early stages, there are very few cancer-related biomarker symptoms and many unrelated molecules. As a result, MCDTs are not sensitive enough to detect symptoms of cancer. In other words, there is too much background noise. So the researchers decided to focus on only one thing: extracellular vesicles (EVs) - tiny bubbles that mediate cell-to-cell communication.
Vesicles can be used to diagnose early cancer symptoms
Healthy cells and cancer cells release EVs into the bloodstream. cancer-derived EVs often carry many cancer-related biomarkers, which can cause problems. When these proteins are transferred to other cancer cells, they can increase resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs, improve metastasis, increase nutrient delivery, and disrupt the immune system, according to a previous study. But there is a silver line: the content of EVs captures diagnostic power, For example, some EVs found in pancreatic cancer contain a protein called macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF), which suppresses the immune system. However, the amount of MIF in the vesicle may serve as a predictive marker for liver metastasis. That is, if the MIF increases, the cancer is more likely to spread to the liver.
Lowy and his team cleaned the EVs of blood for patients with pancreatic, ovarian, and bladder cancer, as well as healthy controls. Next, they analyzed the protein composition of the samples. By comparing samples from cancer and controlling patients, scientists have developed a machine-learning algorithm to identify a small set of EV proteins that can be used to detect pancreatic, ovarian, and other cancers.
Their algorithm successfully detected 95.5% of the first stage of pancreatic cancer, 73.1% of the first stage of ovarian cancer, and 43.8% of stage 1 cancer of the bladder, indicating the potential value of this early cancer detection technology.
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