Abstract PO5-07-08: A Serum Biomarker for the Early Detection of Breast cancer
Authors: Chavany Christine , Dea Jeffrey , Guevara Monica , Hernandez-Gonzalez Rafael , Ferroni Patrizia , Guadagni Fiorella , Valle Rosaura , Jendoubi Moncef 
Published: May 2024

Background: After decades of use, clinicians and medical societies are still debating on the clinical utility of mammography, the standard of care for breast cancer (BC) screening, because of its limitations such as subjective visual interpretation, high rate of false-positive and false-negative (in dense breast) and concerns over radiation exposure. There are 55 million women, and about 45% of them considered dense breast, in need of an accurate, easy to use test for the screening of BC regardless of breast tissue complexities to differentiate between BC and benign findings such as calcification and fibrosis. To this date there is no blood protein biomarker (BM) in clinical use for the early detection of BC. We have developed a novel BC specific protein biomarker -based blood test to detect patients with early-stage BC and established herein the diagnostic performance of our BM in discriminating BC patients from healthy individuals and benign breast cases. Methods: A total of 433 serum samples (318 primary BC, 32 benign breast and 83 normal breast) were obtained from the Cooperative Human Tissue Network and from the IRCCS San Raffaele Pisana Research Center (blind samples). 247 BC samples were provided as blind samples and were used to validate the screening utility. Serum samples were tested with our BC specific BM by sandwich ELISA. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were calculated to evaluate the diagnostic performance, by determining sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), area under the curve (AUC), and confidence interval (CI). Statistical analysis, ROC curves and scatter plots were performed with GraphPad Prism 7.0. Results: BM elevation in early cancer cases (stage I-II, Ductal Carcinoma) was found to be statistically significant (p&lt; 0.0001) as compared to healthy and benign cases. Our test discriminated early BC patients from non-cancer cases with 87.3% SE at 85.2% SP and was further validated in a blind set including 247 BC (Ductal & Lobular Carcinoma, stage I-III), 30 benign and 83 normal breast cases (88%SE, 86%SP). The sensitivity for early-stage (I-II) and late stage (III) BC was 86.8% and 94.3%, respectively. While lobular carcinoma is particularly not well detected by mammography with a sensitivity as low as 57% and much lower for women with dense breast, it was detected with high sensitivity (90%) in our test. 80% of fibrocystic changes (FCC), the most common form of benign breast disease in women over 50 years of age were negative with our test. Although it is a benign condition, FCC may be misdiagnosed as a malignant lesion by physical examination and imaging. Conclusion: Our results support the utility of our blood-based test for the early detection of breast cancer which presents improved features over mammography such as higher lobular cancer sensitivity, lower detection rate of common form of benign condition often misdiagnosed by imaging, absence of radiation and expected high compliance. Further testing is needed to confirm accuracy of our test in the dense breast population.

Citation Format: Christine Chavany, Jeffrey Dea, Monica Guevara, Rafael Hernandez-Gonzalez, Patrizia Ferroni, Fiorella Guadagni, Rosaura Valle, Moncef Jendoubi. A Serum Biomarker for the Early Detection of Breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2023 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(9 Suppl):Abstract nr PO5-07-08.