CANOMICS · Multicentre discovery of breast cancer biomarkers

Breast cancer is the most common cause of death from cancer among European women, and over half of the worldwide breast cancer related mortalities occur in the developing world. Despite improvements in surgical techniques and chemoradiotherapy, the ability to cure patients with breast cancer remains limited and five year survival for patients with advanced disease is dismal. Expression profiling and biomarker discovery aims to provide means for tumour diagnosis, classification, and prediction of response to therapy and prognosis. This could potentially lead to the building of robust early detection modules, and personalised effective breast cancer therapies which would improve outcomes. The emerging field of proteomics targets the discovery of early stage biomarkers in biological tissue which could lead to new clinically valid biomarkers discovery.The goal of this application is to develop proteomic tests using different approaches for identification of breast cancer biomarkers which could ultimately form the basis of a screening and/or prognostication test. Using different biological samples and proteomic biomarkers’ discovery methods improves the prospects of classification and stratification of different biological groups. Early cancer detection, improved treatment selection and outcome are expected in return. This project is focused on early detection where comparative analysis of proteomes of normal individuals and patients with cancer, as well as different subgroups of patients, will be used to develop a “signature” of changes that are characteristic of breast cancer. Our study will be based on serum and breast tissue samples collected and analysed in 5 centres.