FRIDAY, Oct. 22, 2004 (HealthDayNews) -- Duke University Medical Center researchers have developed a new method to detect differences between normal and cancerous lung tissue.
This technique, which measures proteins that are produced in different amounts in healthy and cancerous lung tissue, could potentially be used for diagnosis and treatment of many different kinds of cancer.
This Duke team found that their new method, called ADEPPT, can detect proteins in lung cancer tissue that's missed by current conventional methods of protein profiling.
"Increasingly, cancer diagnosis and treatment will become dependent upon isolating the proteins responsible for disease and using these proteins to develop targeted therapies aimed at blocking or enhancing them," Dr. Edward Patz, a professor of radiology and pharmacology and cancer biology, said in a prepared statement.
"But much of our time is spent on isolating which proteins are relevant to a particular cancer, and if we could speed that process, we may be able to develop new therapies," Patz said.
The new technique is described in an article in the Oct. 15 issue of the journal Analytical Biochemistry.
More information
The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about early cancer detection.
