Researchers from Dartmouth Medical School say they have a new way of identifying a deadly form of breast cancer that plagues 17 to 37 percent of all breast cancer patients and mostly premenopausal black women.Identification comes in the form of locating the marker nestin -- a long filamentous protein indicating the presence of basal epithelial tumors -- which makes this type of cancer hard to diagnose and hard to treat. It also puts patients at high risk for recurrence, marked by a very short time between treatment and relapse.
"Ideally, a marker like nestin would enable clinicians to monitor these patients through frequent tests of a biomarker and, in doing so, detect the cancer before it has a chance to come back," says one professor.
Researchers must now find an effective means of detecting nestin in a clinical screening setting. It won't be as simple as a blood test -- but a non-invasive collection of mammary duct samples may enable the development of a screening tool for at-risk patients.
