Researchers have developed a genetic test that can identify how patients with triple negative early-stage breast cancer will respond to immunotherapy drugs. This means that patients who are unlikely to respond to these drugs can avoid the adverse side effects associated with them and can be treated with other therapies.
Genetic test identifies patients with triple negative breast cancer who are unlikely to respond to immunotherapiesProfessor Laura van 't Veer presented latest results from the I-SPY2 phase 2 clinical trial at the 14th European Breast Cancer Conference in Milan. Researchers have developed a genetic test that identifies patients with triple negative breast cancer who are unlikely to respond to immunotherapies.
The I-SPY2 trial was established in 2010 to find ways to screen new anti-cancer drugs and match them to specific biological markers in patients with breast cancer at high risk of early recurrence. Researchers developed an immune classifier, called ImPrint, composed of 53 genes, which can be used in the clinic to predict the likelihood of a patient responding to immunotherapies by looking at the biology of the patient's tumor.
"However, we noticed that the performance of ImPrint for triple negative breast cancers, where immune oncology drugs are now standard of care, was not yet good enough to identify patients in whom a 'likely response' to immunotherapy was so low that harm from serious side-effects would be higher than the benefit.
Patients in the immunotherapy arms had been divided equally into two sets: a training and a test set, and the sets were also balanced so as to have an equal number of"responders" and"non-responders." "The likelihood of an immunotherapy drug response for triple negative cancers that are ImPrint-positive, remains very high at 74%, while among patients that ImPrintTN identified as likely 'non-responders' the pCR rates for immunotherapy are now very low at 16%—low enough for the harm from immunotherapy drugs to outbalance the benefit in these patients," said Prof. van 't Veer.
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