With more than 44,000 people diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK alone, it is obvious that there has been an explosion of life-saving treatment advances against breast cancer in recent years.
True, today there’s an overwhelming menu of treatment choices to fight the killer disease, bringing new hope and excitement, the patients could not still be spared of unnecessary and lengthy treatment.
But, it is only recently, a team of researchers have revealed two genes that can identify the cells that respond — and that don’t — to a common chemotherapy drug. This will surely streamline the breast cancer detection process and help develop more tailored treatments.
In the finding process, the researchers eventually looked for a specific genetic make-up in breast cancer cells that generally does not respond to the chemotherapy drug docetaxel, and they happened to stumble upon the two genes.
Thus, the new finding may not just spare cancer patients of the lengthy treatments in future, but also may help predict if the drug will work or not before treating a patient with it – and that too, by using a very simple test!
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