Experts Debate Value Of HER2 Testing Methods

Extract

In spite of the 1998 Food and Drug Administration approval of Herceptin for treating advanced breast cancer patients with HER2-positive tumors, there is still a controversy about the method of choice to determine whether a tumor is HER2 positive. To air the conflicting data and hopefully come up with new strategies, the National Cancer Institute brought together more than 100 experts for a day and a half last October.

“The general conclusion was essentially that we really don’t have an ideal way to detect HER2,” said Thomas Davis, Ph.D., senior investigator at NCI’s Cancer Therapeutics Evaluation Program who organized the meeting. “We need to include multiple detection methods in future trials to establish which is a superior method.”

Drug and Test Development

Overexpression of the HER2 protein occurs in 25% to 30% of breast cancers and to varying degrees in other tumors. The HER2 gene is amplified in about 90% of breast tumors that overexpress the HER2 gene protein product.