Abstract
BackgroundLarge numbers of translational breast cancer research topics have been completed or are underway, but they differ widely in their immediate and/or future importance to clinical management. We therefore conducted an international Web-based consultation of breast cancer professionals to identify the topics most widely considered to be of highest priority.MethodsPotential participants were contacted via two large e-mail databases and asked to register, at a Web site, the issues that they felt to be of highest priority. Four hundred nine questions were reduced by a steering committee to 70 unique issues, and registrants were asked to select the 6 questions they considered to be the most important.ResultsVotes were recorded from 420 voters (2,520 votes) from 48 countries, with 48% of voters coming from North America. Half of the voters identified themselves as clinicians, with the remainder being academics, research scientists, or pathologists. The highest priority was to identify molecular signatures to select patients who could be spared chemotherapy, which gained about 50% more votes than the second topic and was consistently voted top by voters in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. Research scientists voted the determination of the role of stem cells in breast cancer development, progression, and treatment sensitivity as the most important issue, but this was considered the sixth priority for clinicians and fourth overall.ConclusionThis exercise may bring a greater focus of research resources onto issues voted as top priorities.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been a major increase in the application of new scientific tools and knowledge to tissues and fluid samples from patients with cancer in an attempt to better understand the biology of the disease and the consequences that this biology may have for prognosis and response to treatment
The highest priority was to identify molecular signatures to select patients who could be spared chemotherapy, which gained about 50% more votes than the second topic and was consistently voted top by voters in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world
There has been a major increase in the application of new scientific tools and knowledge to tissues and fluid samples from patients with cancer in an attempt to better understand the biology of the disease and the consequences that this biology may have for prognosis and response to treatment
Summary
There has been a major increase in the application of new scientific tools and knowledge to tissues and fluid samples from patients with cancer in an attempt to better understand the biology of the disease and the consequences that this biology may have for prognosis and response to treatment. Received the greatest attention in this pursuit of translational research, and a number of resultant highly cited articles have affected our view of the disease [1,2] It is clear, that the new technologies such as expression array profiling are powerful tools, their untargeted application is likely to be a missed opportunity for delivering important clinical advances. The identification of high-priority questions for the breast cancer research community may be better obtained by wide consultation within that community than by local opinion based on the challenges posed and opportunities available to individual investigator groups. Such identification might result in a prioritisation of the respective issue in terms of research activity, funding priority, peer-reviewed publications, and symposia presentations. We conducted an international Web-based consultation of breast cancer professionals to identify the topics most widely considered to be of highest priority
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