Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology Rochester, Minnesota
President and Group Chair, Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology Professor, Oncology Sandra J. Schulze Professor of Novel Therapeutics Rochester, Minnesota
Validating predictive and prognostic biomarkers in patients with post-chemotherapy residual breast cancer.
While chemotherapy is widely used for the treatment of breast cancer, for some patients, cancer cells remain following treatment and are presumably chemotherapy resistant. Researchers are seeking to understand the factors that contribute to resistance, including investigators from the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. Large clinical trial networks such as Alliance provide the infrastructure to collect significant amounts of data at levels unattainable from a single trial. As such, the Alliance A011202 (NCT01901094) clinical trial was designed to examine chemotherapy resistance by enrolling patients with breast cancer that remains after chemotherapy, thereby offering a unique opportunity to compare tissue from tumors before and after chemotherapy. Dr. Galanis is leveraging this large collection of samples to gain new insights and identify biomarkers of response to chemotherapy, information that will inform treatment decisions for breast cancer patients.
BCRF support of Alliance A011202 has enabled collection of tissue so that these comparisons can be made. To date, over 4000 patients have been enrolled in the trial, affording Dr. Galanis and her team the ability to conduct the largest comparison of tumor tissue before and after chemotherapy.
Dr. Galanis and her Alliance colleagues will continue to collect and analyze these tissues to identify “biomarkers” of response to chemotherapy in specific subtypes of breast cancer. This has the potential to identify certain groups of people that benefit most from chemotherapy, as well as those who may not benefit and can avoid unnecessary treatment.
Evanthia Galanis, MD is the Group Chair of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, and President of the Alliance Foundation. In this role, Dr. Galanis oversees and supports the scientific research mission of the Alliance, including the critical work of the Alliance Breast Cancer Committee, a leader in large national and international trials to improve the lives of women with breast cancer. The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology is a cooperative group formed with the merger of the North Central Cancer Treatment Group, Cancer and Leukemia Group B, and American College of Surgeons Oncology Group. It consists of approximately 850 individual sites and 235 main networks.
Dr. Galanis has served as Chair of Neuro-Oncology with the Alliance for the past 13 years, working across the organization to support the scientific mission of Alliance to improve the lives of people with cancer. She has also conducted multiple cooperative group phase II and randomized studies of small molecules and anti-angiogenesis agents in the treatment of glioblastoma through the North Central Cancer Treatment Group and the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology.
In addition, Dr. Galanis has a special research interest in clinical trial endpoints and innovative trial designs in neuro-oncology. Her work has been supported by the National Cancer Institute, and she has been involved in several Mayo Clinic Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs), including the Brain Cancer, Ovarian Cancer and Breast Cancer SPOREs.
2022
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