Blood Test Can Help Improve Treatment Outcomes For Breast Cancer Patients

[News]

With the goal of tailoring cancer treatment for each individual, researchers have presented a study suggesting a simple blood test can help doctors more reliably assess treatment efficacy for patients with metastatic breast cancer. Circulating tumor cells are a reliable predictor of treatment response in metastatic breast cancer.

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[gpawelski]

Yes, response to chemotherapy determined by measuring changes in tumor size with imaging techniques like CT, MRI, and PET can take several weeks and sometimes months to determine if a particular cancer treatment is working.

And yes, a blood test may be another reliable tool to determine sooner if a therapy is ineffective so that therapy can be change earlier and possibly make more significant improvements in survival.

The outcome for metabolic responders and non-responders in imaging or a blood test is basically what is going on with bio-assay, showing what patients are benefiting from what drug agents.

The biggest difference is that with imaging or a blood test, you give the patient potentially toxic and ineffective drugs and wait to make measurements. And then give more potentially toxic and ineffective drugs and wait and repeat measurements.

You still have the patient getting potentially toxic and ineffective treatment and then you still have to wait weeks until you could try Plan B. You measure the drug effects on tumors "in" the patient, one treatment plan at a time.

A chemo-induced gene mutation can happen when the original chemo received does not work. The cancer comes back. When it does this, the cancer comes back more aggressively. The mutagenic effects (changes in form) of chemotherapy on a genetically-unstable tumor, drives the tumor into a state of more aggressive behavior.

Cancers that are a product of these genetic mutations release cells from the usual controls of proliferation and survival, making them so much harder to fight it. Following this mutation, the cancer cells acquire the ability to proliferate without the normal restraints.

As the cancer grows, it may infiltrate and destroy the surrounding tissue, and metastasize by penetrating into blood vessels, lymph nodes, and body cavities. Distant metastasis via the bloodstream may affect virtually any organ.

In a bio-assay, as many as twenty to thirty treatments can be done to see which one works best, "before" they are put in the patient. It does not change cancer biology, it only helps to reveal biology. It lowers the probability that certain drugs will work. It raises the probability that others will work.