Conclusion
We have identified AAGAB as a novel on-treatment biomarker for accurate prediction of pCR and outcome in patients treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. A semi-supervised analysis and evaluation of estimations of established molecular signatures also highlight the potential value of on-treatment biomarkers. Combining on-treatment biomarkers with known clinical prognostic factors could further improve the accuracy of response predictions and deserve further study. On-treatment expression changes in the neoadjuvant setting may offer greater possibilities for the identification and creation of more future novel biomarkers.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the help and support of the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility under the direction of Lee Murphy.
Funding
Cancer Research UK is thanked for providing funding for a PhD stipend and a development fund to the Edinburgh CRUK Centre. AHS is grateful for the funding from Breast Cancer Now.
Availability of data and materials
Gene expression data associated from the study has been made publicly available at NCBI GEO under the accession number GSE122630.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
The protocol for the "NEO study: a study of factors predicting response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer" was approved by the South East Scotland Research Ethics Committee 01 with REC reference: 13/SS/0236. All patients signed an informed consent at least 24 h after receiving the patient information leaflet and after having the chance to discuss thoroughly their participation to this study either with treating clinician or research nurses.
Consent for publication
Not applicable
Breast Cancer Res. 2019;21(73) © 2019 BioMed Central, Ltd.
Copyright to this article is held by the author(s), licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original citation.
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