Grant: Project Grant

Increasingly, women are living with metastatic breast cancer, and while survival rates have almost doubled in the last 20 years, only about 25% of women are still alive after 5 years. Most of these gains have been the result of the optimization of treatments, and many new drugs are becoming available for attacking metastatic disease. Determining whether any given drug is effective is still very difficult; there is a blood test that is not very good, and radiology takes 3 months or more and can be difficult to interpret. If the chosen drug is ineffective, that woman will have been exposed to the very serious side effects of that treatment for 3 months or more, and will have been delayed in receiving something more effective. We have developed a blood test for breast cancer that is very sensitive and specific, and have shown that it works well to detect and monitor breast cancer in women with metastatic disease. It works with all forms of breast cancer. Moreover, it looks at changes in the size of the tumour; therefore, it will work with any treatment. It is better than the blood test currently in use and is easily repeated. Our collaborators and I have demonstrated that changes in the first few weeks of starting a new drug are able to indicate how effective the treatment is going to be. Our blood test would allow for the selection of optimal therapies based on the response of the tumours to treatment and to do so in a timely way. The most effective treatments would then be used and the unnecessary side effects from treatments that do not work would be avoided. This would help to extend the lives of women living with this disease.