Theralink announces publication of RPPA study by George Mason University

Theralink Technologies announced work by George Mason University and the University of California, San Francisco, recently published in Cell Reports Medicine. This effort coming from the ISPY-2 trial assessed the tumors from over 700 breast cancer patients via RPPA and uncovered new therapeutic options for some of the most challenging breast cancers that are missed entirely by current diagnostic approaches. One of the many significant findings of the study is a clinically powerful RPPA-identified protein biomarkers, referred to as HARPS. The investigators found that HARPS can be used to stratify patients with Triple Negative Breast Cancer, the most difficult to treat breast cancer, in order to administer more appropriate treatments and will likely lead to significantly improved responses to therapy. This study highlights the critical need for the availability of the RPPA technology in the clinic, as the currently available methods have various limitations that rely on making predictions about proteins. In contrast, RPPA is a powerful and highly sensitive technology that directly measures a protein. This study highlights the critical need to understand proteins in cancer management, as nearly all FDA-approved targeted therapeutics for breast cancer are designed to target proteins. Patients were treated with targeted therapeutics based on these RPPA HARP signature findings, and the response rate to treatment was an astonishing 80% – an unheard-of number for TNBC patients. Breakthroughs like this will save lives and dramatically reduce the cost of unnecessary and ineffective treatments. In addition to the RPPA discovery of the HARP signature, the investigators analyzed other RPPA-based protein biomarkers that indicate cancer resistance to therapy and revealed many previously unrecognized but druggable protein targets. As the current treatments for patients with TNBC and other breast cancer subtypes are often unsuccessful due to the lack of identifiable targets, the sooner physicians have access to RPPA to measure critical protein biomarkers, the sooner these patients can benefit from effective treatments. The same RPPA technology reported in this study is commercially available through Theralink’s Assay for Breast Cancer, with 40% of assays ordered through the lab currently are for these challenging to manage patients with TNBC. With TNBC comprising up to 20% of all breast cancers, the utilization of this assay indicates a current and growing need to use RPPA technology to determine treatment for this population of patients.