Shanghai breast cancer research breaks new ground
Medical experts in Shanghai have announced that they have fulfilled the most complete and comprehensive research on genomic alterations on breast cancer, and revealed that precision treatment strategies informed by co-alterations hold promise of improving patient outcomes.
The research by staff at the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center broke the limitation of focusing on signal driver alterations and targeted on genetic interactions in guiding genome-informed treatment decisions, bringing new thoughts in breast cancer treatment.
Breast cancer is the most prevalent female cancer and its incidence continues to rise. There are 2.5 million breast cancer patients in China, in which 120,000 women die of the disease annually.
Early screening, efficient and proper diagnosis, as well as precise treatment are key for breast cancer prevention and control.
Genetic mutation-based treatment policies have been widely used in clinical practice but current practice focuses mainly on one single genomic mutation, which has significant limitations. That is why patients with the same mutation can have different responses to the same treatment and some patients even have drug-resistance to targeted treatment, experts said.
"Co-occurrence and mutual exclusivity of genomic alterations have big impacts on therapeutic response in breast cancer but our understanding of them remains limited," said Dr Shao Zhimin, director of the center's breast surgery department and a leading expert of the research.
The study investigates a large-scale multi-omics cohort and a real-world clinical sequencing cohort, including several clinical trials to study the mutual effects of different genomic alterations on breast cancer patients.
During the research, experts have found many examples of mutual effects of different genomic alterations and expanded their understanding of breast cancer and offered new strategies and theories on individualized and precise treatment.
The discovery was published by world-leading journal Cancer Cell.
Research by local medical experts breast cancer has been published in world-leading journal Cancer Cell.
