New formula could spare women chemo

DOCTORS may one day be able to spare some cancer patients the harsh effects of chemotherapy thanks to new Irish Cancer Society-funded research.

A tool – coming in the form of a mathematical formula that may predict how effective chemotherapy could be in treating a specific type of breast cancer – has been developed by researchers from the ICS cancer research centre Breast-Predict.

More than 250 people are diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer each year in Ireland. It means that nearly one in five women diagnosed with breast cancer are told they have this particularly aggressive form, which is difficult to treat and tends to be more common in younger women.

For chemotherapy to work it has to kill cancer cells in the body. Researchers at Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin have identified a mathematical formula on cells with triple-negative breast cancer to predict how effective chemotherapy would be in killing them.

By using their formula in the lab, the research team now predicts that triplenegative breast cancer cells may respond to a new drug already being used to treat some leukaemia patients.

Dr Robert O’Connor, head of cancer research at the ICS, said that up to now, doctors have only been able to treat people diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer with chemotherapy, as more targeted treatments have been unavailable.

This research is the first step towards perhaps being able to offer these patients more targeted therapies. The early-stage research was led by PhD student Federico Lucantoni, under the supervision of Jochen Prehn, professor of physiology and director of the RCSI’s Centre for Systems Medicine. ‘ At the moment, the only form of drug treatment available to patients with triple-negative breast cancer is chemotherapy,’ said Prof. Prehn. ‘ While this will work well for some patients, others may find that their cancer cells don’t respond as well as might be hoped to chemo, leading to patients suffering the side effects of this treatment without any of the desired outcomes. We hope that, if successful in further testing, our research may one day allow doctors to give women more tailored and effective treatments, and spare the harsh sideeffects of chemotherapy in women who are unlikely to respond well to it.’

The research team will continue the research by testing their formula in more advanced breast cancer models in the lab.

This will fine-tune their work to potentially make it suitable for patient trials.