Currently, with a premalignant breast cancer diagnosis from a biopsy, there are three options: observation, chemoprevention, or surgery, all of which require a patient to make decisions while operating from a place of fear and unknown outcomes. Some patients, for example, with early breast cancer indications, might choose to have mastectomies, rather than live in uncertainty, when the disease state may not have progressed.

That is why researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) are investigating a molecular diagnostic test to determine whether, after biopsy, someone is at high or low risk for actually developing malignant breast cancer.

"The test aids in the decision whether to treat aggressively or wait,” says cancer researcher and principal investigator Georg Weber, MD, PhD, a professor at UC’s James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy.

The study, "Osteopontin and Premalignant Breast Lesions,” appears in the October 24, 2018 issue of The British Journal of Cancer.

In the study, Weber, coauthor Elyse Lower, MD, professor of medicine at the UC College of Medicine, director of the UC Cancer Institute’s Breast Cancer Center and UC Health oncologist, and colleagues at Wroclaw Medical University in Poland, analyzed variants of the biomarker osteopontin in 434 women with premalignant breast lesions.

From the sample, they determined that the presence of osteopontin variants can very reliably assess the risk group a patient belongs to, thus aiding in the decision on how to proceed. "The value lies in being able to examine invasive potential,” says Weber, adding that prognostic biomarkers inform on the probable disease course while predictive biomarkers provide upfront information regarding how likely a patient is to benefit from a specific treatment, and hence may guide the choice of available therapies.