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briefly--I, too, have lots on my plate
From Dr. Slamon's paper's abstract--"A baseline serum sample for each patient was taken before trastuzumab-based therapy was started. Patients were subsequently monitored over 12 to 20 months and serum samples were taken at the time of clinical assessment and tested with Bayer's HER2/neu and CA15-3 assays" The abstract does not go into the detail that the paper does about retesting serumher2 about 3 weeks after the first dose--it is the~20% reduction at the second testing which according to the paper predicted herceptin efficacy. The patient's clinical course, ie, how well herceptin worked in them over the intervening 12-20 months was studied and came to the following conclusion--
CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that serum HER2/neu testing is clinically valuable in monitoring metastatic breast cancer patients undergoing trastuzumab-based treatment and provides additional value over the commonly used CA15-3 test. The percentage of baseline HER2/neu concentrations in the early weeks after the start of therapy may be an early predictor of progression-free-survival.
TO ME THAT MEANS IT IS A PREDICTOR OF HOW WELL HERCEPTIN MAY WORK, which may reflect both inherent efficacy ie, lack of inherent resistance. How much it reflects anything about the degree of acquired resisitance which may/may not occur and when it may occur is clearly debatable/unclear, but the bottom line is that those who achieved that degree in decrease in serum her2 ECD were those who responded the longest and had the longest progression free survival
Hope this helps
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Hybrid Mode
