Biomarker Discovery for Bowel Cancer

Clinicians will be able to distinguish rectal and bowel cancer patients who will do well after surgery from those who may subsequently die from their disease, following the discovery of a biomarker.
The discovery by Macquarie University and Concord Repatriation General Hospital researchers came as part of a 20-year rectal cancer surveillance study.
More than 1.4 million people are affected by bowel and rectal cancer every year throughout the world, but when detected early enough it is one of the most curable types of cancer. According to Bowel Cancer Australia,  fewer than 40 per cent of bowel cancers are detected that early.
A clear diagnosis in later stages can help guide clinicians to make appropriate decisions about prognosis, survival rates, surgery and other therapy options.
“We found that patients presenting with Stage B cancer – that is, confined to the bowel wall – may or may not show detection of a cancer cell biomarker called urokinase plasminogen activator receptor, simplified as uPAR,” says lead researcher Professor Mark Baker, Professor of Proteomics at Macquarie University’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Science.
The research showed that if the uPAR biomarker is present on the cancer cells, it is predicative of undetectable Stage B colorectal cancer metastasis and dramatically poorer survival for those Stage B patients. This has been called clinically-silent metastasis in the past and no marker of it has been available for it until now.
“Amazingly, Stage B patients with no expression of uPAR in tumour epithelial cells survive quite close to what normal population rates are, demonstrating that surgical resection for these patients can indeed be close to curative in those patients,” says Baker.
The team is now chasing how the uPAR protein works cooperatively with other proteins to cause this poor outcome and are undertaking rational drug design to find novel, less toxic, cancer-specific therapies for colorectal cancer patients.
For more details, go to http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117786