Detecting Head and Neck Cancers Earlier.

The analogy is that a tumor marker is much like a black box on a downed plane. Investigators hone in on a preset frequency and listen for the faint signal, leading them to their target. In the same vein, a tumor marker developed at Saint Louis (Mo.) University School of Medicine is being tested for head and neck cancer patients. The presence of such a marker may be helpful in the diagnosis of a tumor. The monitoring of a marker, when known to be correlated with tumor progression or regression, is useful in evaluating prognosis and response to therapy.

The marker--metallopanstimulim, or MPS-1--detects cancer in the tissue simply by existing within the tumor, or by being produced in excess by the tumor cells. "The marker gives us the signal," explains Brendan C. Stack, Jr., assistant professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery...