Arresting Development: Blood Biomarker Patterns May Aid Early Diagnosis of Ovarian Cancer

Scientific American (Aug. 17, 2010)

It is disproportionately deadly because ovarian tumors tend to flourish while producing few obvious symptoms. And no reliable methods exist to detect the cancer at early stages, when treatments are most effective. But this situation may soon change if researchers can extend the promise of a recent study, in which scientists detected ovarian cancer from blood samples with near 100 percent accuracy.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology collected blood from 44 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer at various stages, along with that from 50 healthy controls.

“Part of the reason for that,” McDonald says, “is that cancer is not a single disease-there’s a lot of variability. A given patient may have more of one protein, while another won’t.” (full story..)