project of Biomedicine CIMA (PB CIMA), the entity that manages the patents of CIMA of the University of Navarra, has reached an agreement agreement with the University of California (UC) to regulate the development of a test that allows predicting the therapeutic response to chemotherapy in breast cancer. It is the first inter-institutional agreement of co-ownership of a patent that the UC formalizes with a Spanish business .

The agreement was signed in San Francisco by Antonio Martín, director general of PB CIMA, and William T. Tucker, director executive of UC's Office of Technology Transfer and Management research . Also in attendance was the director general of the Center for Industrial Technology development (CDTI), of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. Maurici Lucena held meetings with U.S. entities to reach agreements to promote bilateral technological cooperation in the field of research and development+i (research, development, innovation).

The patent is based on the work of Dr. José Ángel Martínez-Climent, researcher of the area of Oncology at CIMA of the University of Navarra. His scientific work has resulted in a new molecular marker of response to chemotherapy in patients with early breast cancer linked to the loss of a segment of chromosome 11q. These findings have just appeared in Cancer Research, the official publication of the American Association for Cancer Research in the USA.

Study with 185 patients

Dr. José Ángel Martínez-Climent explains that, despite the general consensus for the use of systemic chemotherapy in patients with early-stage breast cancer, where the tumor is completely removed after surgery, around 25% of them relapse and die from the disease. "In our work, with the partnership of Dr. Ana Lluch (University of Valencia), we examined the possibility of establishing a genomic predictor of response to chemotherapy in a group of 185 patients. After surgical resection of the tumor, anthracycline-based chemotherapy was administered in 95 cases, and not in the remaining 90".

The results indicated that, although the majority presented a similar profile of genetic alterations, the response to treatment was different according to certain molecular lesions. Thus, "in the patients who received chemotherapy, none of the 2,460 genetic markers (clones) analyzed allowed prediction of response to treatment. In contrast, in the 90 patients who did not receive chemotherapy after surgery the genomic loss of 8 contiguous clones on chromosome 11q was associated with a B increase in the relapse rate."

The researcher concludes that, with the technology employed, "patients with chromosome 11q loss benefit from adjuvant treatment with anthracycline-based chemotherapy. This new predictive marker of response should be evaluated in clinical trials".