New biomarker detected for most deadly breast cancer

Local medical experts announced on Thursday that they have found a biomarker which can be used to forecast and evaluate the effects of immunotherapy on the most deadly breast cancer.

Breast cancer is the most prevalent female cancer in the world. Triple-negative breast cancer, which does not express the genes for HER2, progesterone receptors, or estrogen receptors, is the most fatal and complicated type.

It affects 15 percent of patients, who have a much higher chance of relapse and metastasis with poor treatment outcomes than those with other types of breast cancer. Though immunotherapy is believed to be a promising treatment for this type of breast cancer, how to select patients who can really benefit from the therapy for precise treatment is a challenge in clinical practice.

Dr Shao Zhimin and Dr Jiang Yizhou from the Shanghai Cancer Center led their teams to carry out detailed research and clinical trials and found that CCL19+dendritic cells play a key role during immunotherapy on triple negative breast cancer.

The cells can work with immunotherapy to enhance patients' own immunity against cancer and thus improve the treatment outcome.

The cells exist both inside the cancer and peripheral blood and the levels in both places are positively related. Clinical studies found 80 percent of patients with high levels of CCL19+dendritic cells in their blood could experience their tumors shrinking over 30 percent, while less than 35 percent of those with low levels experienced a significant reduction of tumors.

Therefore direct testing of patients' levels of CCL19+dendritic cells in their blood could be a simple, easy, safe and economic method to predict immunotherapy outcomes and monitor effects. Currently, patients must receive a biopsy, which is invasive, expensive and complicated, said doctors, who have applied for a patent to develop the discovery into a clinical tool.

The discovery was published by world-leading journal Med as a cover article and received high recognition in the medical field, the hospital said.