Breast cancer: a new assay for predicting survival outcome and response to treatment
26.01.2022
An international research team from the University of Padua, the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS), the University of Barcelona (UB), and the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) developed and validated the new HER2DX assay as the first genomic test targeting HER2-positive breast cancer patients. The assay integrates clinical data with genomic data of patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer to predict prognosis and the likelihood of their response to drug therapy before undergoing surgical procedures. The assay calculated the risk score of more than 1,000 patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer based on a 27-gene expression.
The reliability of the risk score is validated through a series of tests taken by more than a thousand patients and confirmed in the study Development and validation of the new HER2DX assay for predicting pathological response and survival outcome in early-stage HER2 positive in breast cancer. The Head of the Medical Oncology Department of the Hospital Clínic, Aleix Prat, coordinated the study in collaboration with a research group of the University of Padua led by Pierfranco Conte and Valentina Guarneri from the Department of Surgical Oncological and Gastroenterological Sciences (DiSCOG) and published in the medical journal The Lancet - eBioMedicine.
HER2-positive cancer accounts for 20% of breast cancers diagnosed, more than 390,000 cases worldwide each year, meaning that, on average, three women are diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer every four minutes. The five-year research study led to the biological heterogeneity of HER2-positive breast cancer markers, making it possible to identify patients with different responses to treatment and different probabilities of relapse after diagnosis.
Before this test, doctors had no tools other than tumour size and axillary lymph node involvement to predict the risk of recurrence or the likelihood of survival.
“Great progress has been made in the past ten years treating HER2-positive cancers, and today the majority of patients have recovered after the initial treatment of chemotherapy or antiHER2 drug treatments. The effectiveness and variety of therapies put patients at risk of being overtreated and undertreated. The problem is that critical therapeutic decisions, such as the amount or type of chemotherapy and the amount or duration of HER2 treatment, have so far not taken into account the biological heterogeneity of the disease," says co-author of the study Pierfranco Conte.
"The results of our research contribute to the goal of personalized care for our patients, allowing a more precise estimate of the risk of relapse and the probability of response to available therapies," adds Valentina Guarneri, professor of the research group.
