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ASCO Issues New Clinical Practice Guideline for Women With Certain Breast Cancers

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The American Society of Clinical Oncology announced today that it has issued a new clinical practice guideline for women with early-stage invasive breast cancer and known hormone and HER2 receptor status, including recommendations on the use of breast tumor biomarkers tests for therapeutic decision making.

According to the new guideline, certain biomarker tests can be used to guide decisions on adjuvant systemic therapy: estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, HER2 receptor, Oncotype DX, EndoPredict, PAM50, Breast Cancer Index, and urokinase plasminogen activator and plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1. However, ASCO added, no biomarker test should be used to guide specific drug or treatment regimen choices, except for estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and HER2 receptor.

Disease stage, comorbidities, and patient preferences should also be considered when making treatment decisions, ASCO said.

The guideline recommendations were developed by a panel that included experts on medical oncology, radiation oncology, community oncology, statistics, and health outcomes, as well as a cancer survivor, who provided the panel with a patient's perspective, ASCO said. The panel conducted a systematic review of literature published from January 2006 through September 2015 and identified 50 relevant studies.

"An extensive number of new tests have come out in the last five to 10 years, but not all have sufficient evidence of clinical utility," said panel co-chair Lyndsay Harris in a statement. "These latest recommendations truly inform physicians about which tests need to be performed. But this is not all that goes into patient care — doctors need to continue discussions with patients to develop individualized treatment plans."

In December, ASCO joined with the College of American Pathologists and the American Society for Clinical Pathology to recommend new draft guidelines for the clinical use of HER2 to test patients for gastric or gastroesophageal cancer.

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