EIF’s Women’s Cancer Research Fund has helped bring about one of the most exciting and ambitious scientific projects today. The EIF Breast Cancer Biomarker Discovery Project is a multi-year effort to find a biomarker – a unique protein – that would reveal the presence of breast cancer in a blood test to provide early detection of the disease, and ultimately change the way physicians are able to forecast many types of cancers before they become life-threatening. Never before has a group of this caliber collaborated on such an ambitious biomarker study, bringing together experts in the fields of proteomics, informatics and clinical breast cancer care. EIF's Breast Cancer Biomarker Discovery Project’s vision for progress is shared internationally by scientific leaders: support and momentum are growing for the development of biomarker discovery.

Scientists conceptualize the project in three stages:

• Stage one: develop and apply cutting edge technologies to examine blood, tissue and breast fluids to identify hundreds of biomarker candidates. Close collaboration of the project’s clinical breast cancer experts and technology leaders is critical to success.
• Stage two: develop assays (tests) to measure the biomarkers at very low concentrations in blood. Technology breakthroughs to make assay development simpler and less expensive are critical to this process.
• Stage three: confirm the presence of the most promising biomarkers in hundreds of blood samples from healthy women and women with breast cancer.

EIF and its Women’s Cancer Research Fund led the way to bring about the Breast Cancer Biomarker Discovery Project, the first study of its kind conducted across expert labs sharing methods, data and using common blood and tissue samples. EIF’s commitment to invest in this project has catalyzed significant progress toward the development of a biomarker-based test for breast cancer detection, which has the potential to directly improve patient care.

Under the leadership and oversight of Seattle’s renowned Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, EIF’s Women’s Cancer Research Fund supports a consortium of institutions which are participating in the EIF Breast Cancer Biomarker Discovery Project.

Learn more at www.womenscancerresearchfund.org.