SCIENTISTS in Glasgow believe they can develop a world-first urine test for cancer that could detect liver cancer early.
Currently there is no definitive urine test used to diagnose any form of cancer, with most patients being diagnosed via surgery, ultrasound scans or blood tests all usually requiring a trip to a hospital or doctor’s surgery.
By contrast, a team of researchers at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow have discovered a potential biomarker for liver cancer that they believe could be used to develop an easy, non-invasive urine test for the disease.
There are around 610 cases of liver cancer each year in Scotland, and incidence rates are significantly higher in Scotland than the UK average.
Many patients are diagnosed only when already receiving treatment for existing diseases such as cirrhosis or fatty liver disease, meaning they tend to respond poorly to chemotherapy drugs.
Just 15 per cent of people in the UK survive to five years following diagnosis.
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Around a quarter of liver cancer patients have a form of the disease where tumour development has been spurred by a protein molecule known as beta-catenin.
The urine test developed by the Glasgow team uses existing technology to detect this beta-catenin form of liver cancer.
The potential for the test was discovered when they were exploring another protein known to be prevalent in liver cancer, called glutamine synthetase.
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While studying this enzyme in normal liver tissue in mice, the research team discovered a new metabolite - called N5-methylglutamine - not previously identified in mammals which is produced by the enzyme.
This metabolite appeared in high levels (along with glutamine synthetase) in mice with a specific type of liver tumour and the levels rose as the tumour grew.
The team that discovered N5-methylglutamine also demonstrated that it appears in the urine of people with beta-catenin liver cancer, meaning that it could be used to identify patients with this specific type of cancer.
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Lead researcher Dr Saverio Tardito, of the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, said: “The number of people with liver cancer is expected to rise, and we need new tools to find it and treat it earlier.
“We were excited to discover this new metabolite which had never been described before in mammals, which is a good candidate for diagnostic testing as it’s specific to a particular type of liver cancer, can be easily detected in urine and could potentially be used as a marker to monitor the growth of tumours
“We now plan further studies to investigate how early in liver cancer the metabolite appears, to identify how early a urine test could reliably diagnose the disease.”
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