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GREENSBORO — In the high-dollar world of medical research, $40,000 can buy more than you might think. Just ask the Mayo Clinic.

With a $40,000 seed grant from the Greensboro nonprofit Friends for an Earlier Breast Cancer Test, along with $100,000 from the Department of Defense, researchers at the world-renowned clinic are testing a new method of detecting breast cancer on 120 women.

They hope the procedure, known as molecular breast imaging, will prove as effective as the current standard, magnetic resonance imaging, at a small fraction of the price. Test subjects will undergo both procedures and the results will be compared.

The research comes as the American Cancer Society has recommended that women with certain risk factors for breast cancer undergo an MRI every year. The recommendation affects an estimated 1.5 million American women.

Researchers also believe that molecular breast imaging will be more effective in detecting cancer than is mammography, the most common test for breast cancer. They already know it is more comfortable than mammography, says Mayo radiology fellow Carrie Beth Hruska.

In the procedure, the patient receives an injection of dye, after which her breasts are compressed gently between two paddles. (In mammography, the breasts are compressed tightly, causing discomfort.)

Cameras mounted in those paddles show where the most dye is concentrating. Cancerous cells take up more of the dye than do healthy cells, so concentrations of dye can indicate potential areas of cancer.

The main difference between magnetic breast imaging and other forms of radiological breast cancer detection, Hruska said, is that MRIs and mammography focus on how cells look. Magnetic breast imaging focuses on what cells do.

“We hope to use this in women who ... have dense breasts on a mammogram,” Hruska said. Dense breasts, particularly common in younger women, make it harder for mammograms to detect cancer, she said, “and having dense breasts increases the risk of breast cancer, so it’s kind of a double whammy.”

Breast density does not affect the cameras’ ability to see concentrations of the dye.

Additional evidence in support of magnetic breast imaging has come in preliminary results from a separate, ongoing study of 2,000 women that compared magnetic breast imaging with mammograms.

Test subjects “had to have dense breasts,” Hruska said. “In that particular group we found three times as many cancers as the mammogram did.

“We had some women who had a negative mammogram who would have been sent home and told that everything is OK, but because they participated in the program, they found out they had cancer.”

That finding is significant because breast cancer is easier to cure if caught early.

An earlier preliminary comparison of magnetic breast imaging with magnetic resonance imaging found comparable results in detecting cancer, Hruska reported in late June to a conference on breast cancer.

But an MRI can cost about $4,000, Friends founder Martha Kaley said, compared with about $500 for magnetic breast imaging.

Kaley said the grant exemplifies the work her group tries to do: providing venture capital for researchers working on new detection techniques. That money can be used to show larger donors that the approach being tested is promising enough to deserve greater funding.

Hruska said the Friends grant was particularly important because the application package was much simpler than is the case with most medical-research grants.

“It takes a significant amount of time to get protocols approved and hire staff to run them,” Hruska said. “There were a lot of costs we couldn’t have (afforded) without them.”

Her board’s decision to fund this research wasn’t hard, Kaley said.

“This particular technology obviously held a lot of promise,” Kaley said. “(It is) saving cost, as well as working with breast density, which has become a real issue in (detecting) cancer.”

Contact Lex Alexander at 373-7088 or lex.alexander@news-record.com