A Phase II Trial to Correlate Early Clinical Response to Pathologic Outcome With Neoadjuvant Systemic Therapy in Patients With Early Stage Breast Cancer
Baylor Breast Care Center
Summary
The purpose of this study is to learn whether clinical response (the amount a tumor shrinks based on imaging or tumor measurements obtained by physical exam) predicts pathologic response (the amount of tumor remaining when surgery is performed) in participants with breast cancer who are receiving chemotherapy prior to surgery.
Description
Neoadjuvant therapy was first introduced to improve surgical outcomes of breast cancer and to be able to assess the pathological responsiveness to therapy at the time of surgery. Over time, it became a useful experimental platform in clinical research in breast cancer, and in recent years became an important part of standard management of certain subtypes and clinical stages in breast cancer. It has been long established that patients who achieve pathologic complete response (pCR, i.e., the absence of any cancer in the tissue removed during surgery) after receiving neoadjuvant treatment have…