TRANSCRIPTION:
DR LOVE: Any thoughts about where things are going to be heading and where you’re going to be heading in terms of use of genomic markers in this situation, early, ER-positive, HER2-negative disease, to determine whether or not to use chemo, and specifically whether or not MammaPrint, the 70-gene assay is — right now, we know from our surveys it’s generally rarely used in the United States. Now they’ve got this big Phase III MINDACT trial that was just reported at the AACR meeting that suggests some value in it. There were a bunch of node-positive cases in it.
What do you think about this alternative of the 70-gene assay?
DR HURVITZ: Yes. I think that the fact that we’re not using it, I think probably what happened in America is the MammaPrint® originally required fresh tissue. So it was dependent on surgeons sending it in. And if you kind of lose your audience of oncologists early on and they’re getting trained on using the 21-gene Recurrence Score®, it’s hard to capture the audience later when you’ve learned how to use paraffin-embedded tissue. So I think that there is definitely value in MammaPrint in that it is being validated in lymph node-positive, as opposed to Oncotype, which isn’t as well-validated in lymph node-positive disease.
I think that there are many questions that relate to the intermediate scores from Oncotype. And without the reporting of that data, we’re still at a loss as to who should have chemo when they have an intermediate score. We’re waiting for TAILORx to report out. And the MammaPrint gives you a high versus low risk. There isn’t this intermediate, which I think makes patients feel a lot more comfortable, certainly. So I have had patients with intermediate-risk scores by Oncotype pay out of pocket to do their tumor test by MammaPrint to make the decision, whether or not to do chemo.
T, AC