How Do Biomarker Test Results Impact a Breast Cancer Patient’s Prognosis

How Do Biomarker Test Results Impact a Breast Cancer Patient’s Prognosis?

How Do Biomarker Test Results Impact a Breast Cancer Patient’s Prognosis? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What role do biomarker test results play in a breast cancer patient’s prognosis? Dr. Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy reviews important biomarkers, such as hormone receptor status, and how they affect care.

Dr. Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy is the Section Chief of Breast Medical Oncology and the Director of the Medical Oncology Fellowship Program in Breast Cancer at The Ohio State College of Medicine. Learn more about Dr. Ramaswamy.

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Transcript:

Katherine: 

How do biomarker test results impact prognosis? 

Dr. Ramaswamy:

All of them do because it’s important to understand that that’s why this – these biomarkers carry a lot of weight. Biomarkers are good, are important, but when the most important biomarkers are that are going to impact outcomes. And then even more important is whether they’re going to predict the efficacy of a treatment, the outcomes used by the success of a treatment, right?  

So, in that way, if your tumor is estrogen and progesterone receptor- positive, then you generally tend to do a little bit better. And they are slightly better tumors for sure, and you know that the anti-estrogens would work. So, these – there’s two ways. They are prognostic and predictive. Now, the whole two positive tumors previously used to have a worse prognosis, but we have such wonderful anti HER2 therapies now that we can use. Now we know that if you use those therapies, the outcomes are better.   

So, it’s predictive again, that predictive of the treatment and prognostic. Now the triple negatives are usually a little bit more difficult to treat because as you can understand, they don’t have any of these targets for us to use targeted therapy at this point. There is definitely some improved outcomes using immunotherapy, but you know that we don’t have those proteins. So, slightly worse outcomes for sure, triple negative among all of these subtypes. And also there is no biomarkers.  

We do use immunotherapy, which is helping certain percentage of those patients, but we still need to understand why it’s not helping other people. So, yeah.