Breakthrough discovered in triple negative breast cancer

NOW: Breakthrough discovered in triple negative breast cancer
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SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Friday morning researchers proudly announced they discovered a way to test triple negative breast cancer patients to see if they are likely to relapse.

Around 8:30 am at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium the lead researchers from the IU School of Medicine announced their findings after 12 years of research and clinical trials. 


Through a simple blood test looking at plasma, doctors could potentially figure out if a patient needs additional treatment after chemotherapy. 

Doctors found that if they look for two markers-- circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) or circulating tumor cells which signify a persons chance of relapse. 

One of the lead researchers, Dr. Milan Radovich says, "When we combined both the DNA and CTCs we were able to discriminate quite well patients who relapse and those who don't. So those positive for both of those markers 48% of them relapsed in two years for those negative only 10% relapsed."

Triple negative breast cancer survivor, Nadia Miller, says this a huge milestone for the breast cancer community, "This sets the foundation to have very intentional interventions and therapies for a high risk breast cancer."

Doctors are also saying that this discovery will allow them to pinpoint therapies that will target the specific mutations in their tumor's DNA. 

This will allow patients a targeted therapy and not an over arching on that could potentially be more rigorous or even unnecessary.

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