PHILADELPHIA – Researchers report finding a new blood biomarker that enables close to 98 percent accuracy in predicting the spread of prostate cancer to regional lymph nodes. Their study is published in the March 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. When cancer spreads beyond a solid tumor, it often does so at a microscopic level that typically cannot be identified by conventional imaging methods such as CT scans. The new blood test measures levels of endoglin, a plasma biomarker that has been previously shown to predict the spread of colon and breast cancer. In this study, researchers concluded for the first time that endoglin could help predict whether a patient’s prostate cancer would spread beyond the solid tumor site into their lymph nodes.
