Research & medical

What is the problem and who is affected?

Laboratory medicine has seen an increasing variety of techniques available for clinicians to use in predicting breast cancer survival and risk of recurrence. These include routine anatomic pathology and more sophisticated analytical tools such fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). This new technique examines hundreds of thousands of strands of DNA/RNA or protein from the tumour and is able to determine the relative quantities (loss or gain) of these elements and then assess the relative likelihood of survival or response to various therapies.

Regretably, the FISH test is expensive and once a particular technique is patented, it cannot be reproduced in other laboratories.

What is this research hoping to achieve?

Dr Oei and Dr Ramsaroop aim to develop a simple, reproducible, routine clinical laboratory FISH test which uses a new set of immunogenic (disease fighting) and genetic markers which predict survival and risk of recurrence, as well as responses to various treatments for women who present with breast cancer in New Zealand.