Dr. Domchek Discusses Areas of Investigation in Breast Cancer

Susan Domchek, MD, director of the Basser Center for BRCA at Penn Medicine, discusses areas of investigation in breast cancer.

Things that physicians are looking at as predictors of response to chemotherapy include how many tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) are at baseline and what the immune cells are, says Domchek. Additionally, physicians are also looking at expression of PD-L1 in the tumor to hopefully give a clear picture of who will respond.

It might also be that certain characteristics of the tumor, including DNA damage repair and homologous recombination defects, may give physicians a clue to these questions. However, it is challenging and physicians still need to sort through all of this information, explains Domchek.