Sudbury leading international study to better treat breast cancer patients

Imagine if your doctor knew your cancer treatment wasn't working and was able to provide other options for you to get better.

A clinical trial is currently underway in Sudbury, Ont., to have a closer look at how patients react to chemotherapy for breast cancer and help healthcare providers figure out the best way to treat the patient.

Dr. Amadeo Parissenti with Health Sciences North Research Institute says the trial is looking at how tumours respond to chemotherapy treatment.

"The burden of cancer treatment is often as bad as the cancer itself. So the whole goal … is to be able to monitor treatment response early in therapy," he said.

"If the treatment is responding by our test then the patient can continue therapy with confidence. If on the other hand the tumour is not responding to therapy by our test, then there's a very high probability that the patient will only receive all of the nasty side effects from treatment without the therapeutic benefit."

'More beneficial treatments'

Parissenti says those side effects include affects on heart function, nerve problems, secondary cancers and blood clots.

"We really need a test that is able to monitor whether a patient is responding," he said.

"If not, we can forego a lot of the these toxicities and get a patient onto other potentially more beneficial treatments like surgery, radiation therapy or other drugs."

The idea to have a closer look at how tumours respond to treatment happened when Parissenti was researching the genetics of tumours when he and his colleague made a discovery: they could see whether or not the treatment was killing the tumour.

That research eventually lead to the clinical trial.

Samples are being collected from five different countries, including Ireland, Italy, Germany, the United States and Canada.

Parissenti says about 700 patients will be involved, which will result in a large sample of data.

"That will help convince oncologists … of the value of this test, hopefully," he said.

'Additional burden for patients'

"The trial may turn out to be negative and then we will either have to look to see why the test didn't perform as well and maybe it has to be tweaked a bit. But this is the way you do a trial in a very unbiased way."

He says the early data looks promising, but says more work needs to be done.

"We need to really validate this in a rigorous way and the only way we can do this is with the consent and participation of patients," he said.

"It is, unfortunately, an additional burden for patients that are being treated."

'Major gift'

Parissenti admits it's a big ask to get breast cancer patients involved as he says to test a patient, a local anesthetic is applied and a sample is taken from the breast through a needle.

"If it means in the future, even for you potentially, that means that your subsequent treatments if you have recurrent disease that we'll have a way to be able to assess your response," he said.

"That will be not just a major gift for Sudbury but for the world as well."