Personalised medicine company Inbiomotion, a member of Catalonia.health, announces that MAF Test® will be available at the Hospital del Mar, the Clínic Barcelona Comprehensive Cancer Center, also members of Catalonia.health, the HM Hospitals centres in the Community of Madrid, and the International Breast Cancer Center/Pangaea Oncology (Barcelona). These are the first public and private centres in Spain to incorporate this pioneering test for breast cancer patients. The widespread implementation of MAF Test® could increase the survival of almost 80% of the 33.000 early-stage breast cancer patients diagnosed annually in Spain, according to estimates for the year 2024 by the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM).
MAF Test® predicts the prognosis of breast cancer patients and helps the oncologist to identify those in whom metastasis could be prevented and who could benefit from adjuvant treatment with bisphosphonates (drugs commonly used to treat osteoporosis). MAF Test® also identifies those patients whose prognosis would be worse if they were treated with bisphosphonates, thus avoiding exposing them to unnecessary treatments that would not be of benefit to them.
Results demonstrating the clinical utility of the MAF Test® were obtained from patient biopsies from two landmark clinical trials, each involving more than 3.000 patients (AZURE and NSABP- B34). These results, published in The Lancet Oncology (2017) and Journal of the National Cancer Institute (2021), showed that 80% of patients with breast tumours had MAF-negative tumours, and that in this group, adjuvant treatment with bisphosphonates (clodronate or zoledronic acid) increased their disease-free survival by 14.3% and reduced their relative risk of death by 21.4% (AZURE). In contrast, patients with MAF-positive tumours did not benefit, and even had a worse prognosis, with bisphosphonate use, regardless of their menopausal status.
This announcement follows a recent publication in Nature Cell Biology that provides key data to elucidate the biology of the MAF biomarker. A team at IRB Barcelona led by ICREA researcher Dr. Roger Gomis, co-founder of Inbiomotion, revealed in this publication the mechanism by which amplification of the MAF gene increases the risk of metastasis in breast cancer. This finding is a crucial step towards understanding the molecular basis of metastasis and has important clinical implications for future treatment of the disease.
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