New cancer research gives hope
Posted April 4, 2012 5:34 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – A cancer survivor woman says there’s hope for others thanks to breakthrough research. The new information will help doctors better diagnose and treat the disease.
Wendi den Brock beat Stage 4 cancer and underwent three rounds of treatment. She explains how doctors detect what’s now being called triple negative breast cancer.
“When they do the pathology they can discern whether these markers are on the tumor or not. You either have certain markers or you don’t and with this particular cancer, you don’t.”
Dr. Samuel Abraham of the BC Cancer Agency says not having the markers makes triple negative harder to treat and because it evolves so differently it makes it one of the deadliest forms of cancer. “This is basically throwing on a switch in a dark room so we can see where everything is.”
He adds the end goal is to lower the number of deaths related to triple negative breast cancer.
“We’re going to have therapies that will be very individualized. Each individual tumor can be looked at as its own entity and treatment will be based basically on that,” says den Brock.
Triple negative breast cancer accounts for roughly one-quarter of all breast cancer deaths.
