Predictors of Prognosis Discovered in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer
Posted: Friday, February 23, 2018
In results with both current and future implications, research examining the cell-free (cf) DNA tumor fraction (TFx) in 164 patients with biopsy-proven metastatic triple-negative breast cancer found that ≥ 10% cfDNA was associated with significantly worse survival. The team, led by Daniel G. Stover, MD, of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbus, published its results in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The investigators also found that particular somatic copy number alterations (such as chromosomal gains in the drivers NOTCH2, AKT2, and AKT3) occurred more frequently in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer than in paired primary tumors and in primary metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
In what the authors call “the largest genomic characterization of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer” to their knowledge, their findings “demonstrate that TFx is a robust, minimally invasive prognostic biomarker.” The TFx, obtained from 506 plasma samples from 164 patients with biopsy-proven metastatic triple-negative breast cancer treated with chemotherapy, was evaluable for almost all patients (96.3%). In metastatic disease, the TFx threshold of ≥ 10% seemed to be linked to significantly poorer overall survival than TFx < 10% (median = 6.4 vs. 15.9 months).
The successful identification of 18q11 and 19p13 as strongly prognostic for poorer survival in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer may contribute to the creation of “novel therapeutic approaches” in the future, the authors concluded. “Unexpectedly, these loci…have never [been] previously associated with triple-negative breast cancer survival.”
