Breast cancer research needs to investigate how a person's ethnicity influences their response to treatment and its outcome, according to a new Comment piece in today's Lancet by researchers from Imperial College London.
Emerging evidence suggests that particular drugs may benefit people from one ethnic group more than others, because of differences in their genetic makeup. However, most key trials looking at treatments for breast cancer have been carried out in predominantly white populations in Europe, North America and Australasia.
Other populations might not respond to a drug in the same way as the white populations in these trials, argue the researchers writing today. They suggest that clinical trials should record participants' ethnicity and analyse whether there are differences in how patients from particular ethnic groups respond to a particular therapy.
The researchers highlight the example of a drug called trasztuzumab, which is commonly used to treat people with breast cancer that is HER-2 positive. Most studies of trasztuzumab have not reported the ethnicity of participants. However, a recent study showed that people with a particular genotype responded better than others to treatment with this drug.
The genotype in question is more common in some ethnic groups than in others, so the researchers argue that an individual's ethnicity could be a key factor in determining which treatments are most likely to benefit them.