Artificial intelligence helps breast cancer patients avoid unnecessary chemotherapy
Artificial intelligence helps breast cancer patients avoid unnecessary chemotherapy
Publish Date: 2026-06-23 11:54:00
Source Domain: www.news-medical.net
Research led by RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and University College Dublin (UCD) has identified immune markers that could help doctors more accurately determine which breast cancer patients are unlikely to benefit from chemotherapy, potentially sparing some patients from unnecessary treatment. Chemotherapy is regularly used in the treatment of early-stage, ER+HER2- breast cancer, which accounts for around 70% of all breast cancer diagnoses annually.
While it remains an important treatment, the side effects can be debilitating and for a significant proportion of patients, the benefit remains uncertain, raising concerns about overtreatment for those who may have remained cancer-free without it. New research published today in Nature Communications has found that analysing the body’s own immune cells found near a tumor using new AI-based methods can provide additional insight to identify which patients can safely have chemotherapy withheld. Currently, patients are assessed using a risk score, but the majority receive an intermediate result, meaning chemotherapy is often prescribed as a precautionary measure. To address this uncertainty, the researchers used samples from a randomized treatment trial comparing hormone-blocking therapy alone against hormone-blocking combined with chemotherapy in an Irish cohort of patients with intermediate risk scores.
Professor Darran O’Connor, research lead at RCSI School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, explained the clinical importance of the findings: “For patients with an intermediate genomic risk, the decision around chemotherapy is often difficult and uncertainty frequently leads to treatment that may not have been necessary, impacting on quality of life.”
“Genomic testing has advanced our ability to tailor treatment for these patients, but AI-based analysis of the tumor microenvironment takes this further still. Crucially, because this approach works from tissue samples processed as…
