From the July 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Lee has reservations about these automated programs though. “All of the data on density and risk have not been based on these automated programs,” she says. “I think that the research has to be done about how they operate and what the significance is.”

She says it’s not that simple to prove significance because it’s not only important to know the percentage of density, but also the pattern of it. “Density is not like your cholesterol level — it’s not one number, it’s a whole spectrum of different tissue patterns,” she says.


Determining the best treatment
The way that women are screened for breast cancer is starting to change and the way they are treated is also changing. Genomic tests are one of the recent developments that have shown promise in helping to determine the course of action to help treat the disease.

At the American Society of Breast Surgeons conference this year, evidence was revealed that showed that Agendia’s MammaPrint and BluePrint are genetic tests that provide insight into how to treat breast cancer. Tests like these examine the activity of genes inside of a cancer tumor in order to give a more comprehensive view of the cancer and treatment choices.

MammaPrint predicts how likely a woman’s breast cancer will recur and may help discern between patients who would have an advantage with comprehensive radiation treatment and those who can safely be treated with more targeted radiation. The BluePrint test determines the molecular subtype of the woman’s cancer and predicts how her tumor will respond to targeted therapies both before and after surgery.

In the Neoadjuvant Breast Registry Symphony Trial study that was presented at the conference, the researchers looked at how the conventional immunohistochemistry-fluorescence in situ hybridization pathology test and MammaPrint-BluePrint classified each patient’s subtype.

They analyzed how the patients responded to neoadjuvant chemotherapy or endocrine treatment in order to see which method was better at predicting response to neoadjuvant therapy. They found that BluePrint reclassified 22 percent of the tumors in the study.

IBM Watson — the supercomputer that won Jeopardy! in 2011 — is also helping to treat breast cancer. IBM and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center collaborated in early 2012 to develop a tool built on IBM Watson to give doctors improved access to current, comprehensive cancer data and practices in order to help them develop personalized cancer treatment recommendations.

July 2014 Magazine

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