Game-Changer for Patients: UMB Researcher Developing Rapid, Low-Cost Test for Breast Cancer Subtyping
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Bright lights shine in the operating theater. A trainee is observing, studying the surgery closely, but something on a nearby wall catches his attention. “There was an old instruction sheet on the back door describing the collection of tumor samples for presumably radioimmunoassay testing to determine receptor status in breast cancer,” said Dr. Clement Adebamowo, who had been that curious surgical oncology student.
“As a surgical oncologist treating women with breast cancer in Nigeria, there were limitations imposed by not being able to characterize the type of breast cancer these women had,” he said.
Decades later, Adebamowo, professor and director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology at the School of Medicine and associate director of population sciences at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, is still thinking about this problem and how to solve it. In developed countries, a massive, expensive health care infrastructure enables this kind of cancer subtyping, where expert pathologists view tumor cells under a microscope and oncologists decide on the best treatment for each individual patient.