© 2004 by Oxford University Press
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© 2004 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
A Big Trial for a New Technology: TransBIG Project Takes Microarrays Into Clinical Trials
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Researchers already use the tools made possible by genomics and proteomics to categorize otherwise indistinguishable tumors and to correlate molecular features with the likelihood of treatment response or with prognosis. But as useful as those techniques are for providing research information, such tools have not been put to the test in prospective clinical trials.
That, however, is about to change. A European consortium plans to initiate a prospective randomized controlled trial early in 2005 in which cancer therapy will be determined in part by microarray gene expression analysis. The trial will test whether a gene expression pattern is more effective than common clinical–pathological criteria at determining which node-negative breast cancer patients can safely bypass adjuvant chemotherapy.
Doctors now use the classic disease and patient characteristics—tumor size, lymph node status, pathological grade, hormone receptor status, and age—to determine whether to recommend that a woman should receive adjuvant chemotherapy. However, even the
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