New Test Could Reveal Chemotherapy Benefit in 24 Hours
27 August 2010 - Scientists have developed a new test to indicate whether the most commonly-used chemotherapy drug will benefit a breast cancer patient within 24 hours of taking it.
Patients currently have to take a full 12-week course of the chemotherapy drug anthracycline, typically in a combination of two or three chemotherapy drugs, before doctors know how well they have responded.
Lead author Dr Nicholas Turner, from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at the ICR, said: “This test may reduce the time taken to discover if a breast cancer patient is not going to have a good response to a chemotherapy from three months to just 24 hours. It would make a big difference to patients, who could be moved onto other treatment options sooner - and spared unnecessary side effects. This test is at an early stage of development and now needs to be confirmed in larger studies to see if it can be effective.”
The team looked at the protein RAD51, which plays a major role in DNA repair. Studying 68 breast cancer patients, they found that if this protein did not work in cancer cells, patients were much more likely to respond to anthracycline. Many of these patients had a complete response with the tumour disappearing from the breast. If the DNA repair process was working in the tumour, they would probably not respond to the treatment, with complete response being unlikely.
Women who don’t respond to anthracycline-based chemotherapy can be taken off it and treated with other chemotherapy drugs, or potentially switched to hormone therapies, such as tamoxifen.
Excitingly, the test also identifies patients who may benefit from PARP inhibitors, a promising new class of cancer treatment currently in clinical trials.
