日本发现从外周血中监测蛋白质预测吉非替尼有效性方法

The new blood test is accurate 65 percent of the time and is safer than the conventional method, the team''''s members said. (据研究人员介绍，这种新的血液试验准确率为65%，并且比常规的试验方法安全)

"It is the first time an easy and safe diagnostic method has been developed (for this end)," said Yusuke Nakamura, head of the team and a professor of medical genetics with the University of Tokyo''''s Institute of Medical Science.

Nakamura said he hopes the method will lessen the use of unnecessary medication and drug side effects, and cut down on drug costs.

The conventional method involves doctors obtaining cancer cells from the lungs and analyzing the genes. The results are more than 90 percent accurate, but the patient needs to be anesthetized and there is a risk of lung damage.

Nakamura and his team discovered about a year and a half ago that a large amount of two kinds of proteins that proliferate cancer growth are found in lung cancer cells of patients unresponsive to Iressa.( Nakamura和他的研究小组于一年半前，在对易瑞沙不敏感的肿瘤患者的肺癌细胞中找到两种能促进肿瘤生长蛋白)

Nakamura said he believes Iressa fails to work in patients carrying such proteins because they counter Iressa''''s effects.( Nakamura认为Iressa之所以对带有这些蛋白的患者不起作用原因是这些蛋白在对抗Iressa的功效)

In their study, using blood from 23 patients unresponsive to Iressa, they found that 15 of them, or about 65 percent, carried one of the two proteins and the amount of these proteins was significant.(在他们的研究中，在23位对Iressa不敏感的患者外周血液中，其中15位，即大约65%患者血液中，带有两种蛋白中一种，并且该种蛋白数量巨大。)