New research suggests that “doctors may be able to spare patients unnecessarily aggressive breast cancer treatments by collecting and testing cancer cells in patients’ blood.”
Around a quarter of the 2.3 million women with breast cancer today are “diagnosed at an early stage where cancer hasn’t spread, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS.” The cancer can become invasive in 10 to 53 percent of cases, so clinicians recommend that all women with the cancer receive treatment, “which can include lumpectomy or mastectomy.” Individual risk factors are sometimes lost in the shuffle with this method, as “some patients may receive aggressive treatments although their cancer might not have spread. For others, treatment might not be aggressive enough.”
The researchers in this study used a chip to “collect cancer cells from the blood of 34 patients with ductal carcinoma in situ,” determining “what genes were turned on in individual cancer cells circulating in the blood, as well as in the cancer cells collected from breast tissue in the same patients.” Using this helps researchers narrow down “what could have been indicative that these cells would circulate,” causing more invasive cancer.
The researchers are now gathering data on “which of these cell types and biomarkers are able to get to a secondary site and stay there.” Mouse models are currently being tested to that effect.
