MINDACT Trial - Sparing patients an aggressive treatment they would not benefit from

Many patients with early-stage breast cancer receive chemotherapy after surgery to reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence. The MINDACT trial was designed to identify those patients with early-stage breast cancer (with 0 to 3 involved lymph nodes) who can be safely spared from aggressive treatment. MINDACT has demonstrated that the analysis of genes in the cancer cells can provide important information about the biology of a patient’s tumour beyond the clinical-pathological tests traditionally used to make treatment decisions.
Use of the MammaPrint® test has shown that up to 46% of the patients who in the past would have been considered at high risk of breast cancer relapse and would therefore receive chemotherapy can now safely avoid such treatment.
Dr. Martine Piccart, MD, PhD, co-founder and chair of the Breast International Group (BIG) and head of the Medicine Department at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium, was a co-principal investigator of the trial. MINDACT can be qualified as a landmark study she said, “Not only has the MINDACT trial the potential to change the way doctors treat patients with breast cancer, it has also created a huge resource for future research, because research using the participants’ tumour samples, blood samples, and clinical outcomes data could allow us to gain a substantially better understanding of the biology of breast cancer.”
The MINDACT trial is managed and sponsored by the European Organisation of Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) as part of an extensive and complex partnership in collaboration with BIG, Agendia (MammaPrint®) and many other academic and commercial partners, as well as Europa Donna, the European Breast Cancer Coalition.