New PREDICT model could reduce number of breast cancer patients given chemotherapy by 38%
The need for chemotherapy could be reduced in up to 38 per cent of breast cancer patients thanks to a model co-designed by a professor at Anglia Ruskin University.
A newly-launched version of the PREDICT Breast model, published in the npj Nature journal, uses the latest breast cancer survival data and takes into account the benefits and harms of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
PREDICT Breast was launched in 2010 by Gordon Wishart, professor of cancer surgery at ARU and then director of the Cambridge Breast Unit at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, with Paul Pharoah, who at the time was professor of cancer epidemiology at University of Cambridge.
They brought together leading clinicians and scientists to develop and validate the model, which was based on Cancer Registry data from the UK.
PREDICT Breast has been continuously updated and allows estimation of 10 and 15-year survival, as well as the absolute benefits of chemotherapy, trastuzumab, hormone therapy and bisphosphonates, informing use of the therapies.
The model is used worldwide by more than 40,000 clinicians and their patients each month.
The new version has been largely unfunded but recently published data will be followed up by a further study in the United States, using data from the SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results programme) database.
Prof Wishart, who is now chief medical officer at Check4Cancer alongside his visiting professor role at ARU, said: “Chemotherapy can cause significant physical effects such as nausea, weight loss, fatigue, bleeding, bruising and increased risk of infection. The data from the new model shows that for a significant number of women with breast cancer, chemotherapy can be safely avoided.
“The PREDICT Breast model has not been built with artificial intelligence, but highlights that significant innovations can be achieved by using high quality data and traditional statistical and epidemiological principles.
“The next development phase will examine the additional prognostic benefit, if any, of expensive genetic risk profile tests over and above that of the free-to-user PREDICT Breast model.”
