Protein Markers May Dictate Future Cancer Care

Many researchers now believe that the future of cancer treatment rests on the development of a "barcode” of proteins and genes that serve as markers to identify cancerous cells and provide hints as to how a patient's cancer should be treated.

While many cancers and other diseases may be the result of faulty genes, biologists estimate that 98% of disease is caused by something wrong in the proteins that genes produce. However, researchers estimate that each gene can give instructions for as many as 100 different proteins. Making matters worse, they have found that the biology of a cancer cell is changeable, so that genes and proteins found to be switched on in a cancer cell one day may not be active the next day. Moreover, many of the markers of interest have not been validated. As more and more subtypes of cancer are discovered, the need for biomolecular markers has become clearer, according to researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, TX, USA). The potential of proteins to flag disease was shown in 2002 when a palette of only five proteins was able to accurately identify patients with known ovarian cancer. However, the investigators say they do not yet know what those specific proteins are or how they even function.

"We have found that a single protein marker may not do the whole job,” said Li Mao, M.D., an associate professor in thoracic head and neck medical oncology research at the M.D. Anderson center. "So we are looking at a panel of molecules combined together that can give us more predictive powers. Eventually, a single drop of blood from a smoker may predict lung and head and neck cancer risk as well as optimal treatment, possible within a decade.”




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M.D. Anderson Cancer Center