Breast cancer without chemotherapy?

Gene-activity test can identify who needs chemo and who needs hormone therapy

A major study's results show promise for a gene-activity test that gauges early-stage breast cancer patients' risks. The test can tell who will benefit from chemotherapy treatment and who will not. Those who do not require chemotherapy are not negatively affected by forgoing chemotherapy.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Medical News Today reported the new study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, shows promise for early-stage breast cancer patients who don't want to undergo the intense therapy chemo offers.

Findings were presented at the European Cancer Congress 2015 in Vienna, Austria and showed the effectiveness of the genetic test called Oncotype DX.

The test was able to accurately identify cancers that were likely to respond to hormone-blocking drugs better than chemotherapy.

Two in three breast cancer cases are hormone-receptor-positive and the patients normally have surgery followed by hormone therapy. The women who participated in the study that were told to forgo chemo had less than a one percent chance of cancer recurring anywhere "far away," such as in the liver or lungs, within the next five years.

Dr. Joseph Sparano, the study leader from Montefiore Medical Center in New York said, "You can't do that... There is really no chance that chemotherapy could make that number better." He claims Oncotype DX "lets us focus our chemotherapy more on the higher risk patients who do benefit."

Using Oncotype DX, researchers found women with low-risk breast cancer recurrence could be treated with hormone therapy, those at intermediate risks received either hormone therapy alone or had both hormone and chemotherapy. Women with a high risk of recurrence had hormone and chemotherapy.

Sparano said, "The compelling results seen in this global study provide unequivocal evidence supporting the clinical utility of Oncotype DX to risk-stratify patients with early-stage breast cancer, and indicate that the findings are generalizable to everyday clinical practice."

Mary Lou Smith, a leader in the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) and the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) is a breast cancer survivor who helped design the study. She believes the "findings will give women with early-stage breast cancer greater certainty that anti-estrogen therapy will decrease their risk of recurrence and increase their chance for survival whereas chemotherapy will not."

All data presented at the European Cancer Congress was the result of the first clinical trial based on Oncotype DX and the study is ongoing.

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