[attach id=251393 size="medium"]Thomas Hatschek, associate professor at Karolinska University Hospital & Karolinska Institutet, Department of Oncology-pathology.[/attach]

A simple blood test can predict breast cancer patients’ response to therapy, how long treatment will be effective and survival.

The results are being presented by Karolinska Institutet and University Hospital at the IMPAKT scientific conference in Brussels, between today and Saturday. The analysis measures growth rate and this is the first time ever that one test have documented this by analysing a blood sample.

The study (called TEX) included 287 women with breast cancer who were treated with two different kinds of chemotherapy. The test, DiviTum, analyses cell-division rate in blood taken from patients before treatment initiation. Regardless of therapy, DiviTum predicted which groups of patients who would respond to treatment or not. Patients with tumours that expressed a low DiviTum value lived significantly longer, 38 months, compared to 21 months for those with high values.

“By analysing the growth rate in a blood sample we can receive new, valuable clinical information on patient risk and ability to respond to treatment. With DiviTum there is an opportunity to identify patients who are at high risk for progression, and this group possibly requires more intense or different treatment,” says Thomas Hatschek, lead investigator for the study and associate professor at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

“We are keen to look at more possibilities to use DiviTum and we will test whether the technology also can be used initially, after starting therapy, to predict and monitor the effect of a chosen treatment. This would at an early stage be a tool to determine whether treatment is appropriate or not. The fact that it only takes a blood sample is an advantage because other methods require tumour tissue,” says Hatschek.