take a blood sample, analyze and learn if a person has cancer. That's the dream of physicians and patients and the key, probably, to increase the cure rates of this disease. The problem lies in choosing the appropriate molecules for effective detection and error. A group of Israeli researchers propose new candidates for cancer biomarkers.
When it comes to finding the trail in the blood of different diseases, the focus tends to settle on proteins. The problem is that these molecules are degraded rapidly and also a specific type can go unnoticed within the set of the thousands that circulate in our blood vessels. "Therefore, the degradation products of these proteins [peptide] have attracted attention, "said the Israeli team in the pages of 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' .
It is fairly unstable when sailing alone, efforts focused on 'supertransportador' blood, albumin, which is capable of carrying a large amount of peptides inside. But this "big sponge," as the authors call, absorbs molecules indiscriminately, so its usefulness as a reservoir biomarkers is limited.
Instead, the team Institute of Technology Technion-Israel noticed molecules HLA, which transport peptides from the cytoplasm of the cells to the surface and can be found both attached to cell membranes and in soluble form, free in the bloodstream. Cancer cells release a large amount of HLA and, perhaps, the peptides to which they are attached could serve as disease markers.
That was the hypothesis of the research, for which analyzed the blood of three patients (one with multiple myeloma and two with leukemia) and several healthy individuals. The first step was to detect soluble HLA molecules and isolate peptides. Then compared with those present in the cell membrane HLA cancer isolated from the subject, thus obtaining the correlation.
In the case of patients with multiple myeloma, 40% of the peptides obtained from the blood corresponded to the tumor cell. In the other two patients, the percentage was 86% due, say the authors, the disease was more advanced and had a lot of cancer cells in the vessels.
This coincidence indicates that "the HLA peptides may serve as biomarkers of cancer," say the authors. Although "be analyzed to confirm the blood of hundreds or even thousands of cancer patients and compare that of healthy people, added. "So far, the proposal adds to the broad spectrum of possibilities that are now under investigation.
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