October 30, 2015 – Oncotype

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:09 — 1.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: Does a genetic test to assess breast cancer recurrence risk deliver? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Oncotype is a commercially available genetic test for breast tumors that’s now been validated for women with low risk disease, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found.  Ben Park, a breast cancer expert at Johns Hopkins with research ties to the company, comments.

Park: It really now has prospectively validated that the low risk group can do completely fine because they really are low risk and don’t need chemotherapy, the hormone therapy alone was good enough to have the middle amount of recurrence rates and I think that the value of this study is it’s a much larger, prospective designed study to explicitly test Oncotype and now we can really say without doubt in our minds that the low risk is really low risk.  :25

Park says it’s good to know that women can safely forgo the rigors of chemotherapy when Oncotype identifies them as low risk but that the risk group assessed as intermediate is really the one where definition is most anxiously awaited.  He says that study is currently underway. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.