CLEVELAND — Researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center (UH) are studying whether a new type of MRI, known as MRF, can predict whether chemotherapy is working on a breast tumor after just the first treatment.
If research shows it works, it could eliminate months of unnecessary treatment and get patients on the right medication to shrink their tumor.
“This study has great potential to bring real survival and quality-of-life benefits to our breast cancer patients,” said Yong Chen, an assistant professor of radiology at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine.
Chen is leading the study with Holly Marshall, MD an associate professor at the School of Medicine and division chief of breast imaging at UH, and Dan Ma, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the School of Medicine.
MRF is a novel approach to magnetic resonance imaging that essentially allows multiple tissues in the body to be examined by taking a single, time-efficient image, or “fingerprint.”
Ma’s lab has been at the forefront of research to develop faster and more comprehensive MRF technology for various clinical applications, allowing early disease detection and assessment of treatment response.
It's just additional software added to a traditional MRI machine.
Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is commonly used to reduce the tumor size before surgery for many breast-cancer patients. But because of different mutations in the same genes (known as phenotypic heterogeneity) in breast tumors, not all patients respond to conventional chemotherapy—nearly 80% show partial or no response.
The standard method to assess a patient’s response to chemotherapy is a change in tumor size, which can require four to six months and multiple cycles of treatment.
Preliminary results of the researchers’ work suggest MRF methods can accurately assess therapeutic response seven to 10 days after the initial chemotherapeutic cycle, creating the opportunity for significantly improved patient care and flexibility aimed at a more personalized therapy.
It's common for breast cancer patients requiring surgery to have an MRI before and after surgery. This research would just add an additional MRI after the first round of chemotherapy.
A $3.05 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute should fund the research for about four to five years.
Researchers will need a lot of case data to determine if MRF is actually predicting accurately and they won't start reviewing the data until they've compiled several cases. That means patients in the study will have no change in their current treatment.
However, down the road, if the research shows results, Dr. Marshall says there's potential for it to be fast tracked and perhaps be a game changer in the way some breast cancers are treated.