(Charlie Fidelman/ The Gazette) — Early detection. Faster, safer, better. Aggressive ovarian cancer is more often than not detected when it’s so advanced that survival is limited; there is no reliable screening test.
Now researchers at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Centre and McGill University say they’ve developed a genetic-based test for two common uterine cancers, including the deadly ovarian cancer. It looks for DNA mutations in 18 genes that often go awry in endometrial and ovarian cancers.
Researchers say the results of PapSEEK, which analyzes small amounts of cancer DNA obtained from the cervix, uterus as well as blood, demonstrate the potential of mutation-based diagnostics to detect such cancers at a stage when they are more likely to be curable — or at the very least, when it can improve cancer survival.
Their findings were published in Wednesday’s issue of Science Translational Medicine.
Better testing is urgent because women often have no symptoms. They can go from running a marathon one day to having Stage IV cancer the next, said Montreal oncologist Lucy Gilbert, one of the study’s authors and director of the Gynecologic Cancer Services at the McGill University Health Centre. (…)