Each year, about 120,000 women in the US and one million women worldwide are diagnosed with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer, which represents about 60% of all breast cancer diagnoses. This type of cancer relies on the hormone estrogen to encourage proliferation of cancer cells. Because of their dependency on estrogen, most ER-positive cancers respond well to anti-estrogen therapies, such as tamoxifen. Those with less aggressive forms of the disease may respond solely to this type of therapy (approximately 50% of diagnoses), but those with more aggressive cancer will also require adjuvant chemotherapy. The question is, how can physicians tell how aggressive a cancer is going to be? If they knew this, they would be able to plan the most effective therapy for each patient, and in many cases avoid the significant side effects and high cost of chemo. A New Jersey-based start-up, , is working to fill the need for a cost-effective, rapid, predictive, prognostic test that can identify ER-positive breast cancer patients requiring chemotherapy.
Developed by Anant Madabhushi, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Computational Imaging and Bioinformatics...
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