Study looks at attitudes toward personalized medicine and breast cancer

Women, doctors and the general public highly value a test that helps determine if breast cancer patients will benefit from chemotherapy, says a study by a Canada-wide research team led by University of Calgary scientists.

This was a two-part study on how women, medical oncologists and the general population regarded gene expression profiling. The test is a form of personalized medicine that analyzes a set of genes in tumours.

The first part of the research effort by Marshall’s team involved qualitative studies that included focus groups, along with interviews with patients and medical oncologists. Views were gathered on the value of — and challenges with — gene expression profiling for making decisions about chemotherapy.

The results were released in two articles in Current Oncology in 2014, including one on patient perceptions, followed by a third published this year in The Oncologist on the views of physicians.