Tumors, test tells in advance who does not respond to chemotherapy

A test that analyses in a way a combination of a series of tumor markers is able to identify cancer patients who have higher probability of not responding to chemotherapy. To put it to point researchers from the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas of Madrid, together with colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the university spin-off Tailor Bio, which They illustrated the characteristics in the journal Nature Genetics. "Chemotherapy is good for some patients, but it is not effective in all cases. Between 20 and 50% of patients with cancer does not respond to these drugs", comments the coordinator by Geoff Macintyre studio. Researchers recently helped identify some biomarkers that signal the presence of instability chromosomal, that is, an anomaly - frequent in cancer - which causes that entire chromosomes or parts thereof are duplicated, absent or poorly assembled. They also discovered that some of these appear to be associated with response to chemotherapy. In the new study, the team verified the presence of these markers in 840 patients with different forms of tumors (breast, prostate, ovary and sarcomas) who had undergone chemotherapy, relating it to the effectiveness of the treatment. Patients with positive markers had a risk up to 7 times higher than not responding to treatment, even in the absence of other risk indicators. "We were able to demonstrate the efficacy of our resistance biomarkers for three types of chemotherapy: platinum derivatives, taxanes and anthracyclines", added Macintyre, who anticipated that the team is working on a larger experiment that confirms the discovery and evaluate its potential application in other neoplasms as well. If the results are positive, the researchers conclude, it will be possible, on the one hand, to save the effects side effects of chemotherapy for those who do not benefit from it, on the other hand, to immediately direct these patients towards treatments which are more likely to succeed.