Cervical cancer biomarker enters trials:
This article was originally published in Clinica
Executive Summary
A US clinical trial will examine cervical cancer smears for telomerase, a protein released into cells to help repair damaged chromosomes, to see whether the marker can predict women at highest risk of cancer. Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hope to correlate "the genetics of a normal biopsy with the expression of telomerase in Pap smears". If this is the case, telomerase expression would indicate treatable genetically altered cells, while no expression would indicate with greater certainty that treatment is not necessary.