There are several chemotherapy regimens that are currently considered acceptable standard adjuvant treatment for breast cancer to improve cure rates. These include, CMF, AC, FAC, FEC, TAC, paclitaxel/AC, paclitaxel/FAC, docetaxel/AC. However, not all of these regimens are equally likely to benefit a particular individual. Clinicopathologic features of breast cancer or single gene markers have not been able to predict reliably who, as an individual, benefits from one particular regimen over another. Administration of all chemotherapy before surgery (neoadjuvant therapy) for newly diagnosed stage I-III breast cancer is safe and as effective as administration of the drugs postoperatively. A minority of patients (10-30%) experiences pathologic complete response (pCR), which is eradication of all viable invasive cancer cells from the breast and lymph nodes. This form of extreme good response correlates strongly with prolonged survival and is considered to be the most reliable early surrogate for cure. Furthermore, neoadjuvant chemotherapy provides an opportunity to study molecular predictors of response. Our hypothesis is that baseline, pretreatment gene expression profile of breast cancer holds information about sensitivity or resistance to chemotherapy. We also assume that this information can be extracted by transcriptional profiling and formalized into a predictor of complete pathologic response through mathematical transformation. In a small (n=45), prospective, single arm clinical trial we have identified a set of genes associated with response and constructed a molecular predictor of pCR to neoadjuvant weekly paclitaxel followed by FAC chemotherapy. The goal of the current proposal is to validate this gene-expression profile-based molecular predictor of pCR and to develop similar predictors for 2 other commonly used regimens, FAC and docetaxel/capecitabine followed by FEC. This program will draw on clinical resources at three institutions, U.T.M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital (Houston, TX), and US Oncology, the largest private practice group in the country. We expect that our work will lead to the development of microarray-based clinical tests to personalize chemotherapy selection for an individual with newly diagnosed breast cancer.
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