New tool targets breast cancer treatment

New York researchers have unveiled a technology tool that analyzes breast cancer tumors to determine a patient’s best treatment options.

Senior Investigator Dr. Jeff Wrana of Mount Sinai Hospital and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute said the tool can predict with more than 80 per cent accuracy a patient’s chance of recovering from breast cancer.

Our hope with this technology is to eventually provide individualized analysis to breast cancer patients and their oncologists so that they are better informed and empowered to select a treatment best suited to them, Wrana said in a statement.

The technology, called DyNeMo analyzes networks of proteins in cancer cells. Analysis of more than 350 patients found those who survive breast cancer have a different organization of the network of proteins within the tumor cells, compared with patients who died following the illness.

DyNeMo can be used to predict the outcome in a newly diagnosed breast cancer patient and then assist clinicians and patients in making informed decisions on treatment.

In the future, the tool may be used to analyze other types of cancer and could be used to predict an individual’s response to particular drugs.

The study was led by the Mount Sinai Hospital team and co-authored by researchers at the University of Toronto and London, England’s The Institute for Cancer Research.

The findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.