According to the American Cancer Society, 192,370 women in the United States will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 2010, leading to 40,170 deaths. Most women with breast cancer undergo surgery to remove the cancerous tissue and then receive additional treatment. Adjuvant therapy does not completely remove the risk of late cancer recurrence, even for women with low grade/low stage tumors. Thus, clinicians and patients still need to remain aware of this problem and this problem remains a high priority in our fight against breast cancer. In the past decades, identification and validation of ER, PR and HER2 as molecular markers and therapeutic targets for breast cancer has improved the patient survival. However, other breast cancer biomarkers currently identified lack either disease-related specificity or validated clinical values. Therefore, effective new breast cancer-specific molecular markers for prevention, early detection, and/or targeted treatment of the recurrent diseases are needed. Biomarkers present in blood, hold the best promise for disease screening. The goal of this project is to develop simple, quick and cost-effective homogeneous assays to evaluate whether AKR1B10 can be used as a breast cancer recurrence indicator by testing the serum samples from both cancer-recurrence positive and negative patients.
