Dana-Farber's Heather Parsons, MD, MPH, discusses a new study showing liquid biopsy could reliably determine whether a patient's breast cancer is HER2-positive or --negative.
We are excited to present uh data sharing that we can from 1 mL of plasma taken from patients, blood detect and determine uh in nearly all patients, the uh her two status. Um and we, what we did, which is really exciting. We haven't, this is a, you know, something that usually comes from tissue um and tissue biopsies can be challenging. Um There is a lot of irregularity when we get into sort uh more her two low status about the um agreement between pathologists. And so to be able to determine her two status and then also er status um from blood is really exciting. Um What we did was we, we used uh plasma from 100 and 30 patients with metastatic breast cancer. Um some of whom were here, uh patients at Dana Farber, some of whom donated to bio banks. And we were able to first epi genomic profile uh from breast cancer cell lines um and determine the differential local lo si between her two positive and her two negative breast cancers. And then using that information, we were able to create a uh an algorithm that looked at um the, her two status and indeed was successful in uh determining her two status from uh just again, 1 mL of plasma, which is really exciting. Um This is uh early research as this is a, this is a proof of concept study. So, retrospective study um done in a fairly small number of patients. But we're really excited to have these data and to work on um next steps would be to which would be to apply this to other patient cohorts. And also to determine ultimately whether these uh determinations of her two and er status are predictive of benefit from those treatments that really target her two and estrogen receptor.
