Molecular Quantitation of Breast Cancer Cells in the Peripheral Blood: Correlation With Clinical Stage at Presentation and Disease Course

Abstract

The overall objective of this project is to develop an assay to detect small numbers of breast cancer cells in a patient's peripheral blood. This assay would be used to test the hypothesis that the presence of circulating breast cancer cells would be predictive of stage at presentation or relapse. The first stage of this project has been to optimize a quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) to quantify breast cancer-specific RNA molecules in the peripheral blood. The result of this initial work was to select keratin 19 (K19) RNA as the best target for detecting small numbers of breast cancer cells. We have also selected an internal reference RNA ((beta)(2)-microglobulin), and we have optimized our protocol for extracting RNA from patient blood samples. Having optimized these parameters, we plan to use the qRT-PCR assay for K19 RNA to study patients with breast cancer, both at the time of presentation and after treatment.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA388205

Entities

People

  • Daniel E. Sabath

Organizations

  • University of Washington

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Biomedical Research
  • Blood
  • Blood Cells
  • Breast Cancer
  • Cell Line
  • Cells
  • Chain Reactions
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Contamination
  • Detection
  • Diseases And Disorders
  • Electronic Mail
  • Epithelial Cells
  • Neoplasms
  • Oncology
  • Polymerase Chain Reaction
  • Standards

Fields of Study

  • Biology
  • Medicine

Readers

  • Oncology and Biomarker-Based Cancer Detection.