Detect cancer early - and beat cancer
Very often people suffering from cancer die because the disease is discovered too late. This crafty, evil disease often refuse to manifest itself for detection until there’s little hope for its victim to fight back.
If cancer can be detected early, we will have a higher chance of winning the war against it by providing cancer patients with the most effective treatments.
Now, there’s hope of victory for cancer patients. A team of scientists from the NIBRT Dublin-Oxford Glycobiology Laboratory at UCD has dev­elop­ed a system to accurately seek out potential “biomarkers” of early forms of cancer. They accomplish this by examining the structures of specific sugar molecules that are attached either to proteins made by cancerous cells or to proteins involved in the host response.
Researchers have discovered that cancer cells have sets of proteins different from normal human cells, and that their proteins have changes in the types and numbers of sugar molecules that are attached to them. The team of scientists, led by Dr Pauline Rudd, have found that there are alterations in sugars attached to proteins in blood serum from all cancers they have looked at. Some of these alterations appear to be early markers of the cancer processes.
Dr Rudd and her colleagues believe that their ability to detect these changes in sugars gives them the key to developing a new approach for diagnosing cancer and monitoring its progression.
Even more encouraging is that they have managed to isolate several sugar-linked variants of particular proteins which are associated with different types of cancer, such as prostrate, pancreatic, ovarian and breast cancers. They believe that if they can find more specific sugar variants, in the long run they will be able to use a combinations of these as biomarkers to enable particular cancers to be diagnosed very early with pinpoint accuracy. These techniques could even replace physical methods, such as scanning, that are not very reliable for early diagnosis.
How are cancerous sugars identified?
The scientists remove sugars from the proteins and break them down into very small components by using enzymes. They then characterize these fragments individually to form a ‘fingerprint’ for each sugar they analyze.
They compare the fingerprints of sugars from cancer patients and cancer-free patients. The sugars that are different from the normal ones are the potential biomarkers. Dr Rudd and her team hope to be able to identify a large number of markers for further testing and then clinical trials.
This technique offers exciting prospect
As more and more such cancer biomarkers are made available, there’s hope that cancer can be detected early and accurately, and also cancer progression and response to therapy can be monitored more accurately than is currently possible. The bottom line is: people will not lose their lives prematurely to cancer.
Other article: Acute stress disorder - the hidden terrorist
