King Saud University (KSU) announced here Wednesday the discovery of a specific lung cancer biomarker to identify lung cancer, which greatly simplifies early diagnosis of lung cancer. The breakthrough was the result of collaboration between a KSU team of scientists and students, headed by Prof. Vadevel Masilamani of Laser Group of College of Science, Dr. Elango of Thendrel, Inc. a biotech enterprise, based in Virginia, USA, and MCD, a cancer diagnostic center in India. Making the announcement at a press conference, KSU Director Dr. Abdullah Al-Othman announced a reward of SR50,000 and a gold medal for scientific research for each member of the KSU team. The research team consisted of Dr. Masilamani, Dr. Mohamad Al-Salhi, both laser physicists; Dr. Abdul Rehman Al-Diab, Head of Medical Oncology, Dr. Hajjar and Dr. M.H Akeely, both oncosurgeons, and two graduate girl students Nadia Yousef and Wafa Al-Saleh all of KSU. The breakthrough is to be patented in the United States and a Chair for Laser Diagnosis of Cancer will be created at KSU. Cancer biomarkers are certain proteins found highly elevated in blood plasma, due to abnormal metabolic activity of cancer cells. A biochemical approach is used to measure biochemicals. But Dr. Masilamani, taking a totally new direction, employed laser-based optical analysis of biomarkers found in blood plasma, urine and sputum. Based on 15 years of research experience in his native India, Canada, Italy and Saudi Arabia and having analyzed body fluids of 3300 cancer patients and 2,800 normal controls, he has developed a new technique called optical diagnosis of cancer. On top of all, Dr. Masilamani has discovered a totally new specific biomarker, found elevated exclusively in the plasma and sputum of patients of squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. This biomarker is present in 83 percent of plasma and/or sputum of lung cancer patients but is totally absent in normal plasma or sputum; Cancer patients of other etiology (breast and colon cancer) do not have this biomarker, which means it is very specific and exclusive for lung cancer. In the new technique, all that is needed is 5ml of blood and 5ml of fasting urine to check if a person has cancer in any part of the body. A number of patents and publications about the technique has been done. The protocol has also been validated by the expert committee set up by Indian Council of Medical Research of the Indian Ministry of Health. The advantages to this form of diagnosis is that 83 percent of cancer patients have the biomarker present in their urine or blood. The discovery will help in early diagnosis of smoking relating health problems because the longer a patient smokes, the higher their concentration of the biomarker. “This would mean that we can, for the first time, quantify the damage done to the lungs by heavy smoking; we can warn heavy smokers with facts and figures, that they are only two years or three years away from serious malignancy,” Dr. Masilamani said. The survival rate of lung cancer is under 20 percent, whereas breast cancer has an 80 percent survival rate. __
