Abstract

Rapid Diagnosis of Breast Cancer: Innovative Approaches with a Focus on Low Resource Setting

Jane Brock, Assistant Professor, Brigham And Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School

Breast Cancer care includes prevention, early detection, diagnostics and therapeutics. Therapeutic decisions are made based on traditional prognostic factors including tumor size, lymph node status, and factors obtained from pathological assessment including tumor grade, immunohistochemical profile of Estrogen and Progesterone Receptor (ER and PR) and Her2/neu gene amplification status. Point of care technology is not currently used in this routine pathological assessment, but there are new opportunities to expedite and facilitate diagnosis, primarily driven by the need to provide breast cancer diagnoses in low-resource settings to the tens of thousands of women who develop breast cancer worldwide. This presentation will discuss alternative methods of tissue biopsy, handling, and imaging and prognostic marker evaluation that can obviate the need for expensive traditional processing equipment and microscopes, and can allow for more rapid cancer diagnosis and biomarker evaluation compared with current traditional methods.