Personalized Breast Cancer Treatment Coming Soon with Help from Spanish Biotech

breast cancer diagnosis personalized

Inbiomotion has published the results of a Phase III study looking at its MAFTest to personalized approaches to the disease.

Inbiomotion, based in Barcelona’s biotech hub, works on a highly selective biomarker for breast cancer. A Phase III study demonstrated that breast cancer patients that would benefit from zoledronic acid therapy can be selected, helping clinicians offer the best treatment possible. As soon as the biotech receives results from a second trial, it plans to kickstart the regulatory processes – hopefully in the second half of 2018.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women – each day, there are over 4,600 new cases worldwide. Initially, 5-year survival is between 65-99%, but this falls to 15% once the disease enters stage 4 – so it’s key to catch and treat it effectively as soon as possible. Inbiomotion’s technology, MAFTest, relies on the expression of the MAF proto-oncogene, which is implicated in cancer metastasis.

MAF-negative tumors were effectively treated with zoledronic acid, highlighted by improved invasive-disease-free survival. But, treatment of MAF-positive tumors with zoledronic acid was associated with a significantly lower invasive-disease-free survival and overall survival. Therefore, MAFTest can identify a group of patients – accounting for 80% of all breast cancer patients – that can be effectively treated using zoledronic acid, while protecting others who would suffer from its use.

Early diagnosis of breast cancer is crucial to improving your chances of survival.

These results will hopefully make personalized medicine for breast cancer patients a reality. Joël Jean-Mairet, Executive Chairman of Inbiomotion, said: “Over 700,000 early stage breast cancer patients are diagnosed every year and improving their treatment options through personalized medicine is an important goal.” Personalized medicine is now up and running thanks to Keytruda’s approval for a particular genetic signature.

The value of the global cancer diagnostics market is expected to rise to $232.7B (€196.6M) by 2025, so it’s little wonder that Inbiomotion is one of many companies in the field. For example, Qiagen and Therawis have partnered up to identify patients that will respond to anthracycline and Agendia is developing MammaPrint to predict the risk of recurrence.

What is encouraging is the development of new breast cancer treatments that go hand-in-hand with improved diagnostics. Earlier this year, Novartis received FDA approval for its first-line therapy, Kisqali. Elsewhere, BerGenBio’s AXL kinase inhibitor has just entered Phase II and Genenta’s cell-based approach will look to build on promising pre-clinical results.


Images – Billion Photos, Timonina / shutterstock.com

Explore other topics: CancerDiagnosticsSpain

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