Researchers May Have Discovered New Way To Separate Cancer Patients Into Risk Groups

A potentially new way to separate patients with the very earliest forms of breast cancer into risk groups, has been discovered by researchers at Queen's University.

Dr Niamh Buckley and her team set out to find a way to predict the likelihood that a woman diagnosed with non-invasive breast cancer (DCIS) had also developed an initially undetected invasive form of the disease, or that they would go on to develop invasive cancer in the future.

DCIS, which is the most common form of non-invasive breast cancer, occurs when cancer cells have developed within the milk ducts but not yet broken out and spread into the surrounding breast tissue.

Around 5,000 cases of DCIS are diagnosed every year in the UK, with 130 in Northern Ireland alone. It has been estimated that about half of DCIS tumours will progress into invasive breast cancer, but it is difficult to predict which cases are likely to do this.

Women with DCIS sometimes also develop early invasive cancers that are so small that they go undetected through the traditional diagnostic investigations. Dr Buckley's research has found that a range of biomarkers in their DCIS tumour could give patients the option of knowing they were more likely to develop invasive disease.

By the same token, while women at high risk of having co-existing invasive breast cancer could then receive more intensive treatment, those at lower risk could also elect to have more conservative treatment.

The team also identified potential treatments which could be used to target the biomarkers they found to be significantly associated with invasive disease.

The study, which has been published in Oncotarget, was funded by Cancer Research UK and was carried out at the Northern Ireland Molecular Pathology Laboratory.

Dr Niamh Buckley said: "Increased knowledge of the molecular profile of non-invasive cancers can only serve to enhance our understanding of the disease and, in an era of personalised medicine, can only bring us closer to improving breast cancer care.

"Our findings require further validation through clinical trials but we believe that the use of biomarkers could pave the way to a significant improvement in the management of non-invasive breast cancer."

(CD/JP)