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Sixty percent of patients with triple-negative breast cancer will survive more than five years without disease, but four out of ten women will have a rapid recurrence of the disease. There are currently no clinical tests to assess an individual patient’s prognosis, so all patients receive aggressive chemotherapy that can include up to four chemotherapy drugs and six months of treatment. Varley’s , recently published in Cancer Research, could change that. “We could very accurately predict which patients were going to have long-term disease-free survival and which patients were likely to have recurring disease. This is very exciting because it could be the first clinical test to enable personalized prognosis for triple-negative breast cancer patients,” said Varley.

Varley triple-negative breast cancer patients, whose tumors naturally turned on an immune response, were disease-free for much longer than those who did not. The objective of the new study was to find a way to translate this discovery into a clinical test to determine which patients have an inherently good prognosis and might safely be treated with less aggressive therapy. “That’s significant because chemotherapy can lead to long-term heart and nerve problems,” Varley noted. “If we can understand which patients need aggressive treatment and which patients will likely do well with less aggressive treatment, we could make a big difference in their lives.”