BERLIN — Some breast cancer specialists still have misconceptions about the appropriate use of multigene signatures in making prognostic and treatment decisions in early-stage disease, a European survey suggests.
The authors found, for instance, that while most specialists agreed that molecular intrinsic subtypes had clinical utility for understanding prognosis in early-stage hormone receptor (HR)–positive disease and for identifying patients for whom chemotherapy could be safely avoided, about 1 in 4 experts either disagreed or felt neutral about the use of signatures in these settings.
Similarly, almost 75% of respondents felt that these signatures were not useful in the triple-negative or metastatic setting, but a small percentage believed they were, and about 10% were neutral.
"Considering that breast cancer multigene signatures were developed in the postmenopausal HR+/HER2- early breast cancer setting, the fact that some experts consider [them] useful in triple-negative, HER2+ breast cancer or in the metastatic setting corroborates a misunderstanding on how to interpret the results," study author Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, associate professor of medical oncology at the University of Milan, Italy, and colleagues wrote.
Curigliano, who is also head of the Division of Early Drug Development at the European Institute of Oncology, presented the survey findings on May 4 at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO BCC) Breast Cancer Congress.
