Can Molecular Markers Predict Response to Adjuvant Therapy?
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: We propose to conduct a study to determine definitively whether examining specific characteristics of a tumor can help identify patients most likely to benefit from chemotherapy and other breast cancer treatments. When planning a patient’s treatment, the physician has detailed information regarding how advanced the disease is and how well the patient is expected to do, but the physician has very little information available to determine how likely a patient is to respond to a given treatment. An important exception is the role of estrogen receptor status in planning for endocrine therapies (such as tamoxifen), for which earlier research demonstrated that the benefit of endocrine therapies was restricted to women whose tumors were positive for estrogen receptors. Since then, interest has been mounting to reveal other tumor characteristics that may predict response to therapy.
 
 
 
 In the proposed study we will examine the ability of specific genetic markers to predict how well patients will respond to therapy. To achieve this goal, we will collect detailed tumor and treatment information from the medical records of 1,695 female Kaiser Permanente members who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer from the late 1980s to the middle 1990s at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Diego, California. Tumor blocks for each of these patients will be examined for changes in the HER2/neu, p53, and BCL2 genes. Using this information, we will determine how often these changes occur in breast tumors and we will determine whether a patient’s response to specific treatments depends on the presence of these genetic changes. If the results of this research suggest a change in the traditional methods of planning patients’ treatment strategies, this information will be made available to clinicians through the investigators’ publication and presentation of the results in cancer journals and at scientific meetings. In addition, we will have the unique opportunity of establishing a cohort of breast cancer patients to examine possible long-term consequences of these gene changes. This project will also support the development of innovative and sound scientific hypotheses resulting from the collaborative partnership between Kaiser Permanente Southern California, one of the largest providers of health care in the state of California, and the University of Southern California, a premier cancer research institution.
 
 
 
 Access to a large breast cancer patient population with tissue blocks available for nearly all patients represents a unique opportunity to advance knowledge in this field, and will allow us to answer important questions regarding the clinical management of breast cancer. The ultimate goal of this study is to provide physicians with tools that will allow them to better tailor breast cancer treatment regimens to the individual patient, reducing morbidity associated with the therapies and improving survival among breast cancer patients.