New blood test can predict future breast cancer
According to the World Health Organisation, breast cancer is one of the most common cancer in women both in the developed and less developed world, and in the long term the scientists hope that the new method will lead to better prevention and early treatment of the disease.
“The method is better than mammography, which can only be used when the disease has already occurred. It is not perfect, but it is truly amazing that we can predict breast cancer years into the future,” said Rasmus Bro, a professor of chemometrics in the Department of Food Science at University of Copenhagen. He stressed the method has been tested and validated only for a single population (cohort) and needs to be validated more widely before it can be used practically.
A new way of detecting diseases
Nevertheless, the method could create a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of breast cancer as well as other diseases.
“The potential is that we can detect a disease like breast cancer much earlier than today. This is important as it is easier to treat if you discover it early. In the long term, it will probably also be possible to use similar models to predict other diseases,” said Lars Ove Dragsted, a professor of biomedicine in the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports.
The method has been developed in cooperation with the Danish Cancer Society and the study was recently published in Metabolomics.
Food science showed the way
The researchers’ approach to developing the method was adopted from food science, where it is used for control of complex industrial processes. Basically, it involves handling and analysing huge amounts of biological data in a holistic and explorative way. The researchers analysed all compounds a blood sample contains instead of – as is often done in health and medical science – examining what a single biomarker means in relation to a specific disease.
“When a huge amount of relevant measurements from many individuals is used to assess health risks – here breast cancer – it creates very high quality information. The more measurements our analyses contain, the better the model handles complex problems,” continued Professor Rasmus Bro.
The model does not reveal anything about the importance of the single biomarkers in relation to breast cancer, but it does reveal the importance of a set of biomarkers and their interactions.
“No single part of the pattern is actually necessary nor sufficient. It is the whole pattern that predicts the cancer,” said Professor Dragsted.
A metabolic blood profile describes the amounts of all compounds (metabolites) in our blood. The scientists measured metabolic blood profiles for this project. When you are in a pre-cancer state, the pattern for how certain metabolites are processed apparently changes.
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