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.

A not-so-new tumor-cell biomarker has been newly unveiled by researchers. And it just might predict how well women will fare after they've been diagnosed with breast cancer and how to best treat each cancer.

When expression of the marker -- called p27 -- is low, especially among women with hormone-receptor-positive tumors, prognosis is typically poor.

P27 was first discovered more than a decade ago but has not been useful for prognostic purposes until now. Previous studies on the marker failed to deliver all patients the same treatment -- so researchers could never determine if outcomes were due to p27 or treatment. But a recent study -- published in the December 6 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute -- followed the same patients receiving the same treatment for newly diagnosed, hormone-receptor-positive, moderate-risk breast cancer.

The new study found women with tumors high in p27 expression had a five-year survival rate of 91 percent. Women with a low expression had a five-year survival rate of 85 percent.

No association was found between p27 expression and survival among women with hormone-receptor-negative tumors.

The next step in the study of this potentially important marker is to better define how women will benefit from this information.

Dr. Chandra Belani, Professor of Medicine and Oncology at the University of Pittsburg Cancer Institute, is a leader in the study of lung cancer. During a podcast interview, Belani shares some thoughts on the state of lung cancer -- currently the most common cause of cancer death in the United States.

Belani reveals that progress in the areas of lung cancer prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment can best be described as modest. There has been some progress -- and there are many on-going studies in these areas -- but there are no major breakthrough stories. Belani says there has been modest progress in diagnosis with the use of CT scans and PET scans -- and a combination of the two. There has been modest progress in chemotherapy treatment options. There has been no significant advance in detection -- and prevention is mostly in the hands of each individual since 90 percent of lung cancer cases are related to smoking.

Belani shares that true achievement would come with the discovery of a biomarker to detect lung cancer early and to lower overall mortality rates. He would also like to determine why he is seeing an increase in lung cancer cases among non-smokers.

The bar is being raised, says Belani. But it's slow going.

Research presented at the meeting on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic Development, organized by the American Association for Cancer Research, says that in the near future the United States will have a new way to detect distant metastasis sooner in breast cancer patients.

The company AdnaGen's diagnostic tool is being evaluated in clinical studies at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The tool can spot one malignant cell in a typical blood sample.

Using the new technology cancer cells can be captured and analyzed to identify several gene products, including potential molecular targets for a specific drug. Treatments for metastatic breast cancer usually will be given based on the features of the primary tumor. The cancer's primary tumor can be estrogen negative but the metastasis can be estrogen positive. Knowing this information can open up more treatment options for those diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.

AdnaGen, which is marketing its breast cancer assay (as well as assays for colon and prostate cancer) in Europe, is awaiting the results of a clinical trial before applying for FDA approval to make the test available in the United States.