Breast Cancer Research Article: By NCI Staff..

New Approach Uses Much Less Tissue to Analyze Tumor Proteins and Genes:

Researchers have developed a “microscaled” approach to analyze the proteins and genetic changes (proteogenomics) of a tumor that uses tissue from a core needle biopsy. The analyses can provide important information that may help guide treatment.

Now, researchers have developed a way to do combined molecular analyses that uses a much smaller amount of tissue. than has previously been possible. Using this “microscaled” approach, the researchers were able to find out why some women with breast cancer responded well to a targeted treatment and others did not.

This approach could be a step toward bringing the analysis of proteins in tumors, known as proteomics, into cancer care, the study authors believe. Until now, proteomic analysis has required too much tissue to be of immediate clinical utility, but in this study the amount of tissue obtained in single core needle biopsies was enough to analyze a tumor’s protein profile as well as its genetic changes.

With core needle biopsies collected from 14 women with HER2-positive breast cancer both before and just after starting treatment, a research team from Baylor College of Medicine and the Broad Institute was able to explain why 5 of those women did not respond to HER2-targeted therapy while the other 9 did.

“This is a very interesting approach,” commented George Sledge, M.D., an oncologist at Stanford University Medical Center who specializes in breast cancer. He expects the approach to draw interest from the wider breast cancer community, especially if it is validated in a larger group of patients across multiple medical centers.