Chemotherapy Or No Chemotherapy – CanAssist Breast Helps You Decide

What comes to your mind when you think about breast cancer? It would most probably be ‘chemotherapy,’ ‘fear of a long process of treatment,’ ‘high costs,’ the fear of cancer coming back, and so on. These thoughts can be controlled with the right knowledge and right breast cancer treatments.

Researchers and oncologists have made new and promising forms of treatment for breast cancer. It’s time to personalize your treatment!

Our test classifies patients as ‘low-risk’ or ‘high-risk’ based on the patient’s breast cancer recurrence risks over five years. The clear-cut test result provides doctors with additional information that can be used for treatment planning.

Plan the ideal treatment

CanAssist Breast is a test that helps to plan the ideal treatment by predicting the breast cancer recurrence risk within five years of surgery. The risk of recurrence is lesser in early-stage breast cancer (Stage 1 and Stage 2), and hence, it is important for doctors and the patients to plan out a suitable course of treatment based on the breast cancer recurrence risk score.

Until a few years back, oncologists and clinicians were deciding cancer treatments based on age, tumor size, node status, grade, ER, PR and HER2 status. OncoStem realized there was a gap in the decision-making paradigm and understanding the tumor biology to comprehend the cancer progression and its aggressiveness would significantly change treatments depending on an individual’s tumor biology.

Tests similar to CanAssist Breast have been based on genomic analysis, whereas CanAssist Breast involves proteomics analysis. The genomics method considers genes of interest in the genome of a cell, whereas CanAssist Breast’s proteomics technique studies the proteins of interest produced by the cell. A 5-year study by OncoStem Diagnostics, recently published online, explains the detailed analysis and results that lead to the test, CanAssist Breast.

Your tumor is different, just like you are, as an individual.

Doctors and oncologists have to know as much possible about your tumor for optimal and ideal treatment.

A way forward – scientific, machine-learning precision

Artificial intelligence and machine learning is an emerging approach in the healthcare sector including the treatment of breast cancer. CanAssist Breast is the first such test developed in India, specifically for Indian patients. It determines the tumor’s biochemical fingerprint and assesses its aggressiveness. Assessing the tumor biology in detail, the test considers five key biomarkers that are involved in recurrence-related pathways in the cell. Based on this combined analysis performed by proteomics-based technology, the information is then assessed by a statistical algorithm that provides a score between 0 and 100 – whether the patient is at low-risk or high-risk for cancer recurrence. A ‘CAB risk score’ less than 15.5 indicates a low-risk. Depending on each patient’s unique CAB risk score, the doctors can thus plan an ideal treatment tailored to an individual’s patient.

A decision that doctors and patients must make:

‘Fear’ is the most shared and challenging emotion that cancer brings with it. However, fearful a patient might be; it is essential for the patients to know and consider that their treatment can be different from that of the other patients.

Knowing who is eligible for the CanAssist-Breast test can help both patients and doctors.

The patients must meet the below criteria to take CanAssist Breast:

• Patients with early-stage, invasive breast cancer
• Patients with hormone receptor-positive (“ER+ and/or PR+”) and HER2- negative disease
• Lymph node-negative or up to 3 lymph node-positive
• Patients should not have gone through neo-adjuvant chemotherapy

In India alone, 150,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. Of these, around 50 percent fall in the early-stage breast cancer category and a majority of them are eligible for this test.

Take your decision together

If you or someone among your friends or family are going through breast cancer (early-stage), you must consider taking CanAssist Breast before starting the treatment. If you are an oncologist or a doctor, maybe your patients could avoid the unnecessary treatments and the side effects most usually associated with chemotherapy.

Doctors must suggest the test to their eligible patients and patients must ask their doctors about the test score and personalize their treatment accordingly.

Want to know more about CanAssist Breast? Get in touch with us.