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BRCA1/2 LOH Testing May Offer Treatment Response Clues in Some Cancer Cases

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and elsewhere analyzed tumor sequence and patient survival data for 160 individuals with germline mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 who had developed breast or ovarian cancer. As described in the past, LOH altered the activity of non-mutated BRCA1/2 alleles in many individuals with heterozygous germline mutations affecting BRCA1 or BRCA2.

 

But LOH was not universal in heterozygous BRCA1/2 germline mutation carriers, the team found. On the contrary, a significant subset of breast and ovarian tumors retained some BRCA1 or BRCA2 function, apparently leading to poorer response to DNA-damaging platinum chemotherapy and shorter overall survival times in the ovarian cancer cases. The findings appeared online today in Nature Communications.

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