Clinical and Molecular Methods in Drug Development: Neoadjuvant Systemic Therapy in Breast Cancer as a Model

• Published in: Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) Vol. 1395; p. 251
• Main Author: Braga, Sofia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01-01-2016
• Subjects: Biopsy; Breast Neoplasms - drug therapy; Breast Neoplasms - genetics; Breast Neoplasms - metabolism; Breast Neoplasms - pathology; Drug Discovery - methods; Humans; Immunohistochemistry; Interdisciplinary Communication; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Neoadjuvant Therapy; Polymerase Chain Reaction; Positron-Emission Tomography; Skin - pathology; Staining and Labeling; Survival Analysis; Immunohistochemistry; Polymerase chain reaction; Neoadjuvant breast cancer; Radiologic response; ki67 labeling; Pathologic complete response; Overall survival; Metabolic response
• ISSN: 1940-6029
• DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-3347-1_15

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT), neoadjuvant endocrine therapy (NAET), and neoadjuvant targeted therapy (NATT), more recently, have been adopted worldwide as standard of care in locally advanced and inoperable BC. These modalities, collectively called neoadjuvant systemic therapy (NAST), are also used for organ preservation and for mechanistic biological studies on drug response and resistance, drug development, and clinical trials. Furthermore, the response to NACT is a valuable indicator of long-term survival. In this work, the advantages and pitfalls of using NAST in BC for studying drug response and resistance for drug development and clinical trials are discussed as well as practical points on how to set up a NAST clinical trial in BC.