José Baselga, MD, PhD, medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses biomarker research for patients with breast cancer.

According to Baselga, the community is still in the process of validating some of the targets. There is a need to incorporate next-generation sequencing platforms into clinical practice.

It no longer makes sense to only check for estrogen receptor mutations or HER2 proliferation, but rather to look at comprehensive panels of genes. This will open opportunities for new ways to detect these abnormalities. For example, researchers are very excited by the prospect of developing liquid biopsies, which have the capacity to look for these DNA alterations in the blood. That would be a non-invasive approach, states Baselga.

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