AVIS donates health research project focuses on cancer biomarkers

The greatest research project on cancer biomarkers is to start in the next months.

The new scientific research will open new frontiers in the field of prevention of two most relevant cancer: prostate cancer and ovarian cancer. The research project, which also includes an important prevention programme, is named "AVIS donates health" (AVIS is the Italian most important  blood donors association) and is supported by Fondazione Abo - Application of biotechnologies in Oncology, Avis, Lilt  (Italiana League for the fight against cancer) and by the three scientific societies of gynecologists and urologists.

The research project will take five years. The first four will be dedicated to data gathering and elaboration and will focus on cancer biomarkers study, in particular on the PSA for prostate cancer and the CA12 and HE4 for ovarian cancer. The latter is a specific biomarker still scarcely used but which hopefully will allow to find out cancer at its very first start. Up to date  70% of ovarian cancer diagnosis happens when it is too late to succesfully cure it. All over the world every year 230.000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 140.000 of them die.

Still more dramatic the numbers for prostate cancer: in the USA more than 192.000 men per year are diagnosed with prostate cancer, more than 27.000 die. Today the PSA test gives a high amount of false results due to inadequate reading of results and to the fact that the test is affected by factors other than cancer. The CA125 biomarker meets the same problem. Another aim of the project is to study the HE4 marker, specific to ovarian cancer and that would allow an early diagnosis of the cancer.

The Italian research project, which will cost 25 million euros (the most gathered by private), is the first in the world to be accomplished on 15.000 healthy persons, 10.000 men e 5.000 women: the main objective is to get a more precise insight into the behaviour of the markers and to develop a set of guidelines internationally validated and used.

Over the first four years blood donors will be offered free examinations  by urologists and gynecologists in all the country. 20.500 urological examinations and 10.200 gynecological examinations will be provided. Moreover, thanks to this project in Venice a biobank will be realized  with about  1.200.000 samples which will remain at disposal for future research.

"We will measure the markers in a dynamic way analyzing their variations in time among all the values available for each person - says Massimo Gion, scientific director of Fondazione ABO -. The aim is registering the long term variations and understanding the way the acceleration in their production is linked to cancer or to a normal physiological process. If we get the results we hope we will also have a model for exploring new diagnostic strategies for other cancers".