Sweat test may replace painful mammogram breast cancer scan

Radical technique born from crime scene work, involves testing patient’s finger sweat, allows scientists to detect breast cancer with 98pc accuracy.

The radical technique, which can also gauge the severity of the disease, is less aggressive and more convenient than patients travelling to a clinic for a mammogram. Picture: Supplied

For the past 15 years, Professor Simona Francese has been working with police on a way of extracting more information from fingerprints left at crime scenes. Her work has had an unexpected result. The technique can detect breast cancer too.

A study of 15 women found that sweat on patients’ fingers contains proteins that allow scientists to detect breast cancer with 98 per cent accuracy. The radical technique, which can also gauge the severity of the disease, simply requires a patient to smear their fingertips onto a sample plate. This could be done in the comfort of their own home and returned by post, rather than having to travel to a hospital or clinic for a mammogram, which can be painful as breasts must be squashed into the machine.

A fingerprint on a knife is viewed under short wavelength light. The new sweat test technique was born from work on fingerprints left at crime scenes. Picture: Brendan Radke

Francese and her team of researchers, from Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield, believe that eventually - if the results from the “proof-of-concept” study are confirmed in larger trials - the process could replace mammograms.

A sample collection plate, currently a sheet of aluminium although the team is looking at alternative materials, could be sent to women every few years.

Last Thursday, NHS figures revealed that 1.2 million women - 37 per cent of those invited - did not turn up for breast cancer screening in England last year. A less aggressive and more convenient system may boost uptake. GPs could also use the technique to triage women with symptoms, allowing their risk to be assessed before they are sent for an invasive biopsy.

Francese, an analytical chemist at Sheffield Hallam, pioneered the technique, which involves running tiny sweat samples through mass spectrometry machines, allowing her to use fingerprints to identify someone’s gender and even whether they have taken drugs. She said: “Looking at molecules that tell us the sex of the individual we bumped into some molecules - small proteins and peptides - that are also indicated as potential biomarkers of breast cancer.”

The patient’s fingerprint is sprayed with a chemical coating, and then placed into a mass spectrometer, where a high-power laser turns the sweat sample into a gas, allowing the different proteins it contains to be detected. The resulting molecular profile gives an accurate marker of breast cancer, and whether it has spread.

Of the 15 women, five had benign non-cancerous lumps; five had early breast cancer and five had metastatic breast cancer that had spread around the body. The fingerprint test was able to confirm these diagnoses with 98 per cent accuracy in the study, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Professor Lynda Wyld, a lecturer at Sheffield University and a cancer surgeon at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, who also worked on the study, said: “Finding enough signal in the sweat of the fingerprint is challenging. But the data that we have so far is very promising. If it’s validated and shown to work in further trials, it has huge potential.”

The team is to investigate whether the same process could be used for other cancers, particularly prostate cancer, which involves some of the same proteins.

The Times