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Blood Test Could Help Treat Breast Cancer

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Sep 19, 2008 5:55 pm US/Eastern

Blood Test Could Help Treat Breast Cancer

  Cynthia Langwiser is in the fight of her life - battling late stage breast cancer that has spread.

"Things have gone very, very well for me. I've had very good results. And you know, I have, you know, essentially my disease is pretty much stable," she says.

Doctors use CT scans to keep track of her therapy -- to see if it's working or not.

"They always come in and they always tell you what your scan results are immediately because they think - they know - that people have anxiety about that," she continues.

She's right. And it can take time for something to show up on an imaging test.

"It can take two to three months before we'll see changes," says Dr. Minetta Liu, a breast cancer specialist, "if we'll see something shrink or, worse, if we see something new or growing, and so I'd rather not wait that long."

Now Dr. Liu and her patients may not have to. The Georgetown researcher found that a new type of blood test can catch tumor changes sooner. "It's called the Cellsearch™ circulating tumor cell test."

When cancer spreads, tumor cells break free and roam through the blood to a new site. The Cellsearch blood test detects and counts those cells -- one by one.

"So the studies that we've done have linked the number of cells relative to a threshold of five with whether or not a treatment is working and whether patients are doing well or not," Dr Liu explains.

In other words, if a patient has five or more tumor cells circulating in her blood before treatment, and that number goes down to less than five afterwards, then that treatment's working. Cynthia is a participant in the study and prefers a blood test to scans.

"If there was a blood test that was really reliable and the standard of care was such that, you know, you didn't have to have these CT scans, or you know people have to have MRI's so frequently, I think it would be, you know, really good."

Especially if your number comes up somewhere between zero and four.

The National Cancer Institute is currently studying treatment decision making based on the blood test. 

For information about the CellSearch™ System: Veridex LLC, http://www.veridex.com

The National Cancer Institute is studying the use of circulating tumor cells in treatment decisions for women with metastatic breast cancer. For more information, go to http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Then type the trial identification number in the search box: NCT00382018.

For information on metastatic cancer: American Cancer Society, http://www.cancer.org



National Cancer Institute, http://www.cancer.gov

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