WASHINGTON, July 28, (Agencies): An experimental test that uses antibodies to detect ovarian tumor cells in the blood correctly identified 16 of 17 women who had the cancer, a Belgian company said on Tuesday.
MabCure Inc said its monoclonal antibodies threw up no false positives — meaning none of them incorrectly identified the blood of healthy women as carrying tumors.
“The availability of a simple blood test with the ability to diagnose the presence of ovarian cancer early and to differentiate it from benign tumors has the potential to save thousands of lives and reduce the need for unnecessary surgery,” Amnon Gonenne, CEO of MabCure, said in a statement.
“Our findings are an important step in that direction and also have significant implications for the future development of cancer-specific targeted therapies.”
If detected early, ovarian cancer can be cured, but more than 70 percent of women have advanced disease by the time they are diagnosed. Ovarian cancer kills 15,000 US women each year, and 140,000 globally.
Symptoms of ovarian cancer are vague and often missed. A protein called CA-125 is elevated in ovarian cancer cells but is not a good test to screen for early cancer.
MabCure has designed lab engineered monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), which are immune system proteins, that were designed to specifically home in on ovarian tumors.
They tested several different versions using blood samples from 17 patients with ovarian cancer, five patients with benign tumors of the ovaries, 24 healthy young females and eight males at UZ Hospital in Leuven, Belgium.
Each version correctly diagnosed 16 of the 17 ovarian cancers, a diagnostic sensitivity of 94 percent, the company said.
“MabCure is currently evaluating the diagnostic potential of its MAbs in detecting ovarian cancer in high-risk patients in a clinical study in Thailand,” the company said in a statement.

Heart disease risk: Americans in certain lines of work, including transportation, food service and farming, may have a relatively high rate of risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and stroke, a new study finds.
At the other end of the spectrum, researchers found, health professionals, scientists and artists are among those with the lowest rates of so-called metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome refers to a collection of risk factors for diabetes, heart disease and stroke — including abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol and high triglycerides (another type of blood fat).
The syndrome is typically diagnosed when a person has three or more of those conditions, and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a major study, found that it can double the risk of heart attack and stroke.
In the new study, researchers found that among a nationally representative sample of US adults, workers in the farm industry and food service (other than waiters and waitresses) had the highest rates of metabolic syndrome — at around 30 percent. That compares to an overall US risk of about 22 percent, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Meanwhile, the risk factors were seen in roughly one-quarter of Americans in the transportation industry (truck drivers and other workers), construction and non-professional health services (excluding people such as doctors and nurses). At the other end of the heart-risk spectrum were “writers, artists, entertainers and athletes” and the category that included scientists, engineers and architects, where the rates of metabolic syndrome were 8 percent to 9 percent. Doctors, nurses and other health professionals, meanwhile, had a rate of 12 percent.
The findings are published in the journal Diabetes Care.
In most cases, the job-related differences in metabolic syndrome appeared to be explained by differences in other associated factors — including rates of obesity and smoking, exercise habits and race. The exception was the transportation industry, where the work itself remained linked to an increased risk of metabolic syndrome even with the other factors taken into account.
The reasons for that finding are not clear, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Evelyn P. Davila of the University of Miami.
But, they note, the finding is in line with past studies that have found relatively higher rates of heart disease and stroke among truck drivers and other transportation workers compared with other lines of work.
It’s possible, Davila and her colleagues write, that factors not measured in this study — such as irregular work schedules and poorer sleep habits, or job stress — might help explain the link between transportation work and metabolic syndrome.
The findings, according to the researchers, do not prove that any given occupation increases or decreases the risk of metabolic syndrome. They do, however, suggest that people in certain job fields need to be especially aware of ways to control their risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. That includes watching their diets and getting regular exercise, not smoking and, if necessary, taking medication to control their blood pressure and cholesterol.
The researchers say the results also suggest that certain workplaces should be targeted for health-promotion programs that raise awareness of metabolic syndrome and how to help prevent it.
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Alcohol eases arthritis: Drinking alcohol may help reduce the severity of rheumatoid arthritis and cut the risk of developing the painful and crippling disease, a study published Wednesday has shown for the first time.
Researchers led by Gerry Wilson, a professor at the University of Sheffield in Britain, asked 873 arthritis patients and a control group of 1,004 people how frequently they had consumed alcohol in the previous month.
The participants also completed a detailed questionnaire, were given X-rays and blood tests, and had their joints examined. “We found that patients who had drunk alcohol most frequently had symptoms that were less severe than those who had never drunk alcohol or only drunk it infrequently,” said lead author James Maxwell, a rheumatologist at the Rotherham Foundation NHS Trust.
X-rays showed less damage to joints, and blood tests showed lower levels of inflammation, according to the report, published in the journal Rheumatology.
There was also less pain, swelling and disability.
Earlier studies had reported similar results in rodents, but this is the first to show that arthritis symptoms diminish in humans in proportion to the frequency of alcohol consumption.
The researchers found that non-drinkers were four times more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis that people who drank alcohol on more than ten days a month.
They cautioned that any possible benefits from alcohol consumption in relation to rheumatism must be weighed against all the well-known health consequences of immoderate drinking.
The findings held equally true for women and men, and for two distinct forms of the disease, one called anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) and the other known simply as “negative”.
“Anti-CCP antibodies are not present in most ‘normal’ people without arthritis,” explained Maxwell.
Previous research has shown that these antibodies develop prior to the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, and are likely linked to the process which causes the disease.
Some patients don’t develop anti-CCP antibodies, but the symptoms are much more severe in those that do.
The scientists could only speculate as to why alcohol helped reduce symptoms and risk.
“There is some evidence that alcohol suppresses the activity of the immune system, and that this may influence the pathways by which rheumatoid arthritis develops,” Maxwell said.
Once the disease has developed, it is also possible that drinking may act as a pain killer, he added.
One limitation of the study is that it did not measure how much people drank, only the frequency. It also relies on people’s memories, and does not report long-term drinking habits.