But more research is needed before test is used for monitoring or screening, researchers say
THURSDAY, June 25, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A cell surface proteoglycan, glypican-1 (GPC1), on circulating exosomes may serve as a potential noninvasive diagnostic and screening tool to detect early stages of pancreatic cancer, according to research published online June 24 in Nature.
Raghu Kalluri, M.D., Ph.D., chair of cancer biology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and colleagues analyzed blood samples from about 250 pancreatic cancer patients and 32 breast cancer patients. For comparison, they used blood samples from healthy donors and small groups of people with other conditions, such as pancreatitis.
The researchers found that exosomes from cancer cells, but not other cell types, harbored high levels of the GPC1 protein. “Any time we identified GPC1-enriched exosomes, we could tell it was a cancer cell,” Kalluri told HealthDay. And while many breast tumors released high amounts of GPC1, all pancreatic tumors did — including early-stage cancers.
“GPC1+ circulating exosomes may serve as a potential noninvasive diagnostic and screening tool to detect early stages of pancreatic cancer to facilitate possible curative surgical therapy,” the authors write. “These results encouraged us to perform further analyses to potentially inform on the utility of GPC1+ circulating exosomes as a detection and monitoring tool for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.”
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