Circulating Tumor DNA — Ready for Prime Time?
Menée sur 30 patientes atteintes d'un cancer métastatique du sein, cette étude évalue l'intérêt d'une analyse de l'ADN tumoral circulant pour le suivi de la réponse thérapeutique
Multiple aspects of the management of metastatic breast cancer need improvement. Patients are anxious about their risk of recurrence and are disappointed at the lack of reliable tests for the early detection of recurrence, even though there are no data to suggest that detection of asymptomatic recurrences a few weeks or months earlier is of any benefit. It seems reasonable that identifying resistance to a new therapy and progression of disease at the earliest moment would avoid needless toxic effects of therapies doomed to fail and would permit earlier initiation of other potential therapies. Finally, the means of estimating overall prognosis for patients with metastatic breast cancer are few. These include tumor markers (e.g., expression of the estrogen receptor), performance measures, and crude measures of the extent of disease or the involvement of particularly ominous sites such as the brain and leptomeninges...
New England Journal of Medicine , commentaire en libre accès, 2012