Lymph Fluid and Blood Collection for Identification of Novel Biomarkers

The goal of the study is to identify node-negative breast cancer patients who are unlikely
to benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy, thus saving them from the adverse effects of
unnecessary treatment. We propose to identify and validate protein markers that can
determine breast cancer recurrence and metastasis, based on an approach our group has
recently found highly promising for biomarker discovery.

The objective of our research is to identify and validate metastasis protein markers in
lymph collected from vessels exiting from the primary tumor and prior to their entry into
sentinel lymph node in women with metastatic breast cancer. Realizing that this novel
procedure cannot be adopted for routine clinical use, we will examine the peripheral blood
for the presence of these identified markers in order to develop a user friendly clinical
test to detect metastasis and to evaluate response to therapy.