Tests Help Docs Find Right Cancer Treatment

Ivanhoe Newswire
Monday, December 18, 2006; 12:00 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- We're always hearing about a promising new cancer treatment that ended up helping some people but not others.

Now researchers from the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston are trying to help doctors determine which therapies could work best for which patients before these treatments are given.

Knowing what will and won't work beforehand is important because it would allow doctors to spare people from receiving treatments destined to fail, freeing those patients to look for treatments more likely to succeed.

The two new tests developed by the M. D. Anderson investigators are showing promise in identifying which women will be most likely to respond to which breast cancer treatments. Both tests are based on genes thought to influence treatment response.

One of the tests gauges the likelihood a woman will respond to standard chemotherapy given prior to surgery. The other identifies which women are most likely to respond to treatment with the drug tamoxifen given after surgery.

Both tests performed well in initial studies, correctly identifying response to the therapies in most of the cases.

"We are moving these tests toward clinical trials, where we can measure improvements in treatment response and track how physicians and patients use this information to make better decisions about treatment," reports Lajos Pusztai, M.D., Ph.D., who participated in the development of the tests.

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SOURCE: Presented at the 29th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in San Antonio, Dec. 14-17, 2006