广为人知的男性前列腺癌血液PSA检测可能作为乳腺癌迫切需要的新测试而获得第二次生命，而乳腺癌是女性最常见的癌症形式，科学家们在美国化学协会期刊《分析化学》上正报道了一项新研究。
Chien Chou和同事们说，血液测试中测量的前列腺癌特异抗原（PSA）是女性乳腺癌的潜在生物标志物。但是，健康女性的PSA水平通常很低以致只有超敏测试能测量到它们。
为提高女性PSA检测，研究人员建立了一种用金纳米粒子和PSA抗体经荧光信号测定记录PSA水平的微光导纤维生物传感器。生物传感器敏感性（在乳腺癌病人中测定升高的PSA水平的能力）与特异性（如何避免乳腺癌错误预测）可与用PSA作为前列腺癌生物标志物的检测相当。"而且，这些值可与乳腺癌当前筛查方法的敏感性和特异性相媲美，这些乳腺癌当前筛查方法有临床检查与乳房X线照片。"科学家们这样报道。
感谢长庚大学长庚纪念医院和台湾科学委员会的资助。（生物谷bioon.com）
doi:10.1021/ac200754x
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Discrimination of breast cancer by measuring prostate-specific antigen levels in women's serum.
Chang YF, Hung SH, Lee YJ, Chen RC, Su LC, Lai CS, Chou C.
Abstract Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) has been reported to be a potential biomarker of breast cancer. Serum PSA of normal women is around 1 pg/mL, which is usually undetectable by current assay methods; thus an ultrasensitive measurement of PSA expression in women's serum is necessary to distinguish normal from malignant breast diseases. To enhance the sensitivity of conventional immunoassay technology for the detection of PSA in sera, we adopted a localized surface plasmon coupled fluorescence fiber-optic biosensor, which combines a sandwich immunoassay with the localized surface plasmon technique. The concentration of total PSA (t-PSA) (from 0.1 to 1000 pg/mL) in phosphate-buffered saline solution and the normalized fluorescence signal exhibit a linear relationship where the correlation coefficient is 0.9574. In addition, the concentration of additional t-PSA in 10-fold-diluted healthly women's serum across a similar range was measured. The correlation coefficient for this measurement is 0.9142. In clinical serum samples, moreover, the experimental results of t-PSA detection show that both the mean value and median of normalized fluorescence signals in the breast cancer group (155.2 and 145.7, respectively) are higher than those in the noncancer group (46.6 and 37.1, respectively). We also examined the receiver operating characteristic curve for t-PSA, and the area under the curve (AUC) is estimated to be 0.9063, the AUC being used to measure the performance of a test to correctly identify diseased and nondiseased subjects.
