Dr. Leyland-Jones on Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tools

Brian Leyland-Jones, MBBS, PhD, director, Edith Sanford Breast Cancer Research, discusses the development of breast cancer risk assessment tools.

Leyland-Jones says all of medicine is becoming personalized. Currently, patients are treated based upon their tumor classification and are then characterized into groups based on tumor size and nodal status. Physicians are now adding genomic layers to other classifications to better treat patients with breast cancer, Leyland-Jones says.

Risk assessment is now beginning to follow the same trend, Leyland-Jones says. A demographic survey is given, mammographic density is assessed, and a new OncoChip, which covers 600,000 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) of particular risk genes, is used. These three approaches will form a new algorithm that individualizes the risk for each individual.

The idea, Leyland-Jones says, is that every woman will be given the risk assessment test instead of receiving a mammogram in the future.