Smear tests might help pick up ovary and breast cancers
The BBMRI.at Scientific and Ethical Advisory Board Member, Prof. Martin Widschwendter (Uni Innsbruck, Austria & UCL, UK), and his team recently published two articles in the journal Nature Communications.
They found systemic epigenetic programming defects in women who develop breast cancer and developed a DNA methylation-based Women’s risk identification for Breast Cancer index that identifies women with breast cancer from cervical cytology samples. The researchers conclude that cells collected during smear tests for cervical cancer might be useful for detecting early tumours such as breast or ovarian cancer.
For their studies, the scientists also used samples from a clinical biobank which highlights the important contributions biobanks can have to medical research.
Major results of the study were also reported on BBC news.
