OncoPlan™: Test that helps Identify Breast Cancer Patients Likely to Benefit from Chemotherapy
Already commercially available, a test known as OncoPlan™, measures the amounts of two members of the same protein family (Shc proteins) -one of which appears to act as an oncogene (tyrosine-phosphorylated (PY)-Shc), and the other as a tumor suppressor (p66 Shc) –thereby helping identify patients with breast cancer who will likely benefit from chemotherapy and those who won’t.Previous studies have shown that OncoPlan™ can predict the aggressiveness of the patient’s tumor and the relative risk of disease recurrence following surgery in breast, colon and gastric cancers.
Now, American and Canadian researchers have studied whether OncoPlan™ can also help identify breast cancer patients who would benefit most from chemotherapy.
According to the study’s lead author, A. Raymond Frackelton, Jr., Ph.D., a Brown University associate professor, staff scientist at Roger Williams Medical Center and Vice President of Research at Catalyst Oncology (marketer of OncoPlan™):
“This may be one mechanism whereby normal cells prevent runaway growth. Perhaps more importantly, aggressive cancer cells must endure oxidative stress– stress that in normal cells triggers p66 Shc to cause cellular suicide. Tumor cells, then, may have both growth and survival advantages if p66 Shc levels are low.”
The study theorized that since chemotherapy-mediated killing of tumor cells does not require p66 Shc, suggests that patients whose tumor cells have low p66 Shc might respond well to chemotherapy.
Indeed they found out that patients who had low levels of p66 Shc and did not receive chemotherapy had very poor outcomes. But if similar patients received chemotherapy, their chances of relapsing and dying from their disease were reduced by two-fold or more while women with high levels of p66 Shc had a much higher likelihood of surviving their disease, but appeared to derive no benefit from chemotherapy.
Find more details from EurekAlert and at AACR News.
Tags: breast-cancer, breast-cancer-test, OncoPlan™Related Stories
POSTED IN: Breast cancer
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