Feb 4, 2009

When it comes to breast cancer, predicting who needs what treatment continues to be a big area of research. But new techniques may help doctors better treat these tumors. The big issue is that similar types of breast cancer tumors can respond differently to treatment and until now it was hard to figure out who needed aggressive treatment and who didn't. But new tests are helping doctors figure it out. Here's the dilemma in a nutshell. Even though two different patients might have the same type of breast cancer, doctor's have noticed that treatment affects them differently. In other words, some respond well to current chemotherapy and radiation treatments and recover while others don't do as well. And since aggressive treatment has more side effects, doctors needto decide who can benefit the most from more aggressive but more dangerous types of treatment. So knowing from the outset that a particular woman's prognosis is bad could allow doctors to give her aggressive treatment right away. Recently, researchers observed protein interactions between cancer cells and healthy cells that were most important in forecasting patient survival. They found that women who survived the disease had a different way their proteins were organized within the cancer cells than those who died. These researchers have now formed a company, called dynemo biosystems, to produce tests that can detect these differences. Hopefully they'll be approved soon and can be used to tailor a patients treatment so we can stop using the one size fits most categories we place patients into now.