Patients with breast cancer whose tumors have spread to other parts of their body live from digitization to digitization. Does their treatment work? Or will they learn that their cancer develops again?
But a new study sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Society Astrazeneca has shown that there is an alternative: instead of waiting for a scan to show that a cancer is developing, it is possible to find early signs that cancer resists the drugs that controlled it.
To do this, the researchers used a blood test to find mutations in cancer cells that allow tumors to challenge standard treatments. Early detection has enabled patients to have moved to a different medication that overcomes mutated cancer. The result was to keep cancer in failure longer and allow patients to have more than an additional year without deteriorating the quality of life.
The study was reported on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published In the New England Journal of Medicine.
Breast cancer specialists who were not associated with the study applauded the results, saying that blood tests could transform how they monitored patients.
“This is a paradigm shift,” said Dr. Mary Disis, professor of medicine and oncology at Washington University and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
