The incidence of cancer is predicted to exceed that of cardiovascular disease as a worldwide health problem.Early diagnosis of many forms of cancer can increase our ability to sueeessfully treat and effect a cure.As well, early detection will improve the likelihood of improved efficacy of the multitude of therapies that are currently less than optimal as intervention strategies.Most diagnostic tests for this disease are expensive and of limited availability.The availability of a simple and inexpensive screening test would enable us to focus limited resources on patients with the greatest likelihood of success at an earlier stage of disease.Our discovery that amantadine acetylation was catalyzed by SSAT, an inducible enzyme that is substantially upregulated in tumour tissue, appears to provide the fundamental requirements of such a screening test.Our early work, both in vitro and in vivo, clearly demonstrated the specificity of amantadine metabolism to N-acetylamantadine as a metabolic pathway catalyzed by SSAT.