If your medical team is recommending that you start a new MBC treatment, you may be wondering if there is a way to know if the treatment is likely to work. Although doctors cannot currently predict with certainty if a treatment will work for an individual person, researchers are studying ways to better make these predictions. The ability to predict before or at the beginning of treatment whether a treatment will work would allow people to begin or continue treatment with confidence and help avoid a treatment that is unlikely to be successful.
Liquid biopsy testing, artificial intelligence (AI), and precision medicine are being studied to see if they can be used to predict whether a treatment will work. Click the links below to learn about these different methods that researchers are testing in clinical trials and for trials studying these methods.
Liquid Biopsy: Circulating Tumor DNA (ctDNA) and Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs)
- Living Beyond Breast Cancer: ctDNA explained and how ctDNA is being studied in MBC to predict if a treatment is working
- Practice Update: A small trial showed that changes in ctDNA may predict a response to treatment for MBC
- American Association for Cancer Research: Changes in CTCs may predict response or non-response to treatment in about 1 month
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Emory Winship Cancer Institute: AI can help predict which people with MBC will respond to CDK4/6 inhibitors
Precision Medicine
- Stanford University: A protein called ENPP1 may control the response of breast cancer to immunotherapy and may predict who will respond to immunotherapy
MBC Clinical Trials
- Metastatic Trial Search: Trials for Making Treatment Decisions
- Metastatic Trial Search: Trials for Circulating Tumor DNA (ctDNA)
- Metastatic Trial Search: Trials for Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs)
Last Modified on October 31, 2024