New Tool Discovered to Help Properly Classify Breast Cancer Subtypes

New findings help to more precisely identify certain subtypes of breast cancer with classification that could help to also improve treatments and target treatments for the disease.

"We have developed an expression-based method for classification of breast tumours into the IntClust subtypes," said lead study author Raza Ali from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, in a news release. "Our findings highlight the potential of this approach in the era of targeted therapies, and lay the foundation for the generation of a clinical test to assign tumors to IntClust subtypes."

Cancer is often the result of genetic changes that cause normal cells to turn into cancerous lesions. However, researchers reiterate that breast cancer specifically is not one single disease. More so, it is the spread of certain gene mutations that can result in tumors that may metastasize at different rates throughout the breast or other parts of the body, as well as require different types of treatment.

Health officials now look for two key markers to predict certain responses to treatments.

For their research, scientists considered close to 997 tumor samples and how they developed their new system based on 7,544 samples from a public database. Researchers worked to classify the device, dubbed IntClust system, and two main systems in use today, including PAM50 and SCMGENE.

Findings revealed that the new system was excellent for predicting patients' prognosis and response to treatment as previously existing systems.

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Genome Biology.