Biomarkers, auxiliary breast cancer detection

• April 25, 2024

New detection of breast cancer? Research projects have been vital for cancer to decrease its incidence, there are new therapeutic options that cure it and give better quality of life to those who suffer from it.

Breast cancer has had an increase in recent years, placing it today as the leading cause of death in women over 40 years. Although efforts have been made to stop this disease, Nora Gutiérrez Nájera, from the Faculty of Chemistry of the UNAM , said that "when a woman feels a small ball in the breast means that the cancerous process takes a long time."

The researcher works on the identification of biomarkers in breast cancer, which are molecules that serve to monitor the presence of a disease, its evolution towards a more severe degree of it or be a therapeutic option to obtain better treatment results.

A biomarker can be a protein, a nucleic acid or a metabolite like glucose.

These biomarkers are intended to identify certain proteins that can provide important information about the presence of breast cancer, as well as being a diagnostic factor thereof.

According to Gutiérrez Nájera, who also collaborates with the National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), This work is done through proteomics, which is related to the study of proteins, as well as the knowledge of them when a pathology is present.

"The goal of proteomics is to study the proteome, which is the set of proteins in an organism, cell, organelle or tissue that occur in certain circumstances. For example, if I can study proteins in a tumor, I can detect which ones are different from the healthy tissue of a breast.

"We started making comparisons with breast cancer cell lines and normal breast tissue and found differences between the proteins of cancer cells against normal cells," he explained.

This work was carried out with proteomics techniques such as electrophoresis, separation by liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, which serve for the identification of proteins.

This investigation arose from two approaches. The first was to know which genome mutations lead to cancer and, second, to detect proteins that were involved in the cancer process.

Gutiérrez Nájera commented that the detection or treatment would be easier if the proteins that act as biomarkers of breast cancer were located in the bloodstream, since their identification could be done with a common clinical blood test.

In addition to that it has been proposed to identify them through urine or tears, although he clarified that this has not yet been done, because first he would have to find which proteins to look for.
 

Video Medicine: TRACO 2018 - Breast cancer and Epidemiology (April 2024).