Researchers at Florida's Moffitt Cancer Center are gaining deeper insight into the biological processes going on inside a tumor in an effort to battle cancer more effectively. They've developed a new technique to analyze specific protein complexes in cancer specimens.
Called proximity ligation assays (PLA), the new approach allows these complexes to be visualized and measured. These protein complexes could become new biomarkers to help clinicians diagnose and treat patients with a certain class of drugs called receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Analyzing these protein complexes using PLA may also help physicians figure out how patients become resistant to these drugs.
The technique is different from traditional cancer biomarkers. Current biomarker analysis primarily focuses on single genes or proteins. But this approach can be problematic, the researchers say, because it doesn't give physicians the full picture of what's occurring within a tumor. Proteins don't function on their own; they interact with many different proteins and are often part of bigger, multi-protein networks or complexes.
The findings, which appear in the journal Science Signaling, are the first step in the researchers' goal of assessing treatment-relevant protein complexes in cancer specimens.
"We show that it is feasible to build assays that reflect protein complexes in cancer cells and these assays are associated with drug sensitivity. Our lab is developing additional assays reflecting protein complexes relevant to cancer therapeutics and we envision the ability to use these assays to help make therapeutic decisions for our patients," Dr. Eric Haura, director of the Lung Cancer Center of Excellence at Moffitt, said in a statement.
The innovation comes at a time when many diagnostic companies are focusing on cancer products. Next-gen cancer diagnostic outfit Illumina ($ILMN) is expanding its operations to a new facility in Foster City, CA this year. And Myriad Genetics ($MYGN) just nabbed FDA approval in December for its companion diagnostic test for AstraZeneca's ($AZN) ovarian cancer drug Lynparza. Then there are the myriad deals going on in the oncology diagnostics space. Most recently, Biocept ($BIOC) partnered with Insight Genetics to develop a better diagnostic to detect the most common type of lung cancer.
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