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Seattle research team develops test for asbestos-related cancer

By Luke Timmerman
Seattle Times business reporter

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But a team at the nonprofit Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) in Seattle, and a diagnostic company that bought an exclusive license to the technology, think they have created the first simple way to spot asbestos-related lung cancer, mesothelioma, with a blood test.

In a paper being published tomorrow in the British medical journal, The Lancet, noted researcher Ingegerd Hellstrom and colleagues say they have found a key protein that breaks off into the bloodstream from mesothelioma cells.

In a test of blood samples from 273 Australians with the deadly disease, they found 84 percent had high levels of the protein in their blood, while patients who had never been exposed to asbestos had normal amounts of it.

If that high accuracy holds up in tests with more patients, and more studies confirm that elevated protein levels could predict cancer, it could be a breakthrough.

It could provide some peace of mind for the millions of people who have been exposed to asbestos, or it could offer doctors a chance to fight the cancer with chemotherapy at its earliest, most vulnerable stages.

"This is a good step forward because with mesothelioma, you have no simple diagnostic tool," Hellstrom said.

An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people in the nation are diagnosed with the asbestos-related cancer each year.

Diagnostic tests are usually not nearly as lucrative as drugs, but the test developer, Fujirebio Diagnostics, of Pennsylvania, is hoping it will appeal to the tens of millions of people who have been exposed and wonder whether they have cancer.

Matt Tumasz, senior director of marketing, sales and business development for Fujirebio Diagnostics, said his company is far along in development, and hopes to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration and enter the market within one year.

The company believes that the blood test will enable doctors to spot cancer one or two years earlier than current methods.

Tumasz said it is too early to make sales projections, because the company is still working on setting a price and determining the size of the market.

In its deal with PNRI, Tumasz said the Fujirebio will support some ongoing research, but he wouldn't reveal financial terms. Hellstrom said it won't be a windfall — the institute negotiated for a milestone payments, but it will get no ongoing royalties. Asked how much money it added up to, she said, "not a lot."

But while the institute won't get rich off the diagnostics, it is keeping the rights to the protein as a bull's-eye for targeted drugs, she said.

"I am in this business to see if anything we do can be useful to patients. That's the biggest payback in my world," Hellstrom said.

Dr. Gary Goodman, a lung-cancer specialist at Swedish Medical Center, said the test results beg many other intriguing questions. He said he'd like to see more studies testing people who have been exposed to asbestos but remain healthy, take blood samples annually to look for the protein, and follow them for years to see if they get cancer. If a person has a faint, early form of the disease, how long will it take for the blood test to spot it?

He'd also want to see how many "false positives" it generates, one of the common criticisms of the PSA test for prostate cancer.

"This is a start," Goodman said.

Luke Timmerman: 206-515-5644 or ltimmerman@seattletimes.com

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