Researchers are constantly looking for ways to improve the treatment of and response to breast cancer, and the brilliant minds at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have designed a new experimental blood test that could prove to be an important diagnostic tool in the future.
It's called the cMethDNA assay, and according to researchers it can detect the presence of metastatic breast cancer DNA with up to 95 percent accuracy. Previously, the risk of recurrence for breast cancer survivors would only be measured if the patient complained of particular symptoms (like shortness of breath and bone aches). However, the new test allows medical professionals to monitor 10 specific genes, leading to more accurate diagnoses of breast cancer recurrence.
"The goal is to develop a test that could be administered routinely to alert the physician and patient as soon as possible of a return of the original cancer in a distant spot," Saraswati Sukumar, co-director of the Breast Cancer Program at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, said in a statement. "With the development of cMethDNA, we've taken a first big step toward achieving this goal."
There is currently a patent pending on the test, and researchers plan to conduct several additional studies to confirm their exciting findings.Whizzco