Brock Schroeder Discusses BCI Findings in ER+ Breast Cancer

Brock Schroeder, PhD, senior director, Medical and Scientific Affairs at bioTheranostics, discusses findings regarding the Breast Cancer Index (BCI) in predicting patients with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer at high risk of recurrence.

In this study, researchers investigated 2 cohorts of patients who had ER-positive, early-stage disease with clinically low-risk breast cancer. Researchers sought to determine whether the BCI could stratify patients based on their risk of late recurrence. This is an important issue, Schroeder says, given the findings of the NSABP B-42 trial, which showed that only a small proportion of patients benefitted from extended endocrine therapy.

Results showed that even in the clinically low-risk patients, the BCI identified approximately 30% of those as being high risk for late recurrence. Those patients had a significantly elevated risk of recurrence compared with BCI low-risk patients. Although these are clinically low-risk tumors that are node-negative, they are likely to recurrence and benefit from extended endocrine therapy, he adds.