Active clinical trials for "Breast Neoplasms"

The purpose of this study is to find out how much oxygen is used during a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) in women who have mild cardiotoxicity after standard treatment for HER2-positive breast cancer, and to see whether the results of this test can be used to predict how well participants' heart and lungs will work if they continue to receive this kind of treatment.

Primary objective: The primary objective is to define the proteomic and molecular characteristics of primary and recurrent/ metastatic breast tumours with special focus on the expression of S100 protein and the estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) genes Secondary objective: To expand our understanding of the complex molecular pathways dictating the progression of breast cancer and their response to different treatment regimes. To relate proteomic findings to survival data To identify potential serum markers of breast cancer progression

Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer in women. Currently, breast conservation surgery (BCS) is the treatment most often prescribed. BCS involves removing the tumor while conserving the greatest amount of healthy breast tissue. Under standard white light, tumor borders are difficult for the surgeons to visualize. Therefore, between 30-70% of patients require a second operation to remove remaining cancerous tissue that wasn't detected during the initial surgery. Thus, there is an urgent clinical need for a new imaging tool that improves tumor visualization during the first surgery. PRODIGI, a new hand-held optical imaging device, uses a safe violet-blue light to detect fluorescence signals in the tissue. Different tissues are associated with specific fluorescent colors and therefore the device can be used to differentiate between tumor and healthy breast tissue. Based on previous clinical data, PRODIGI can distinguish some tumors from normal tissues, but is not specific enough to detect a difference across all breast tumor types. The fluorescent contrast drug 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) accumulates in tumors naturally and previous research has shown that 5-ALA increases tumor-normal tissue fluorescence contrast. In this observational clinical study, PRODIGI and 5-ALA will be used to visualize tumor borders during BCS. 5-ALA induced fluorescent images from the surgical sample and the surgical bed obtained by PRODIGI will be compared retrospectively with the images taken under standard white light and/or autofluorescence. The technology's ability to accurately identify tumor borders better than conventional practice will be confirmed by tissue pathology.

The purpose of the study is to determine if it is possible to identify and perform a needle biopsy of the sentinel lymph node. The investigators hope to identify breast cancer cells in the lymph nodes under the arm without making an operation necessary. The rationale for this study is that for patients without enlarged lymph nodes under the arm, sentinel lymph node biopsy is the standard way of determining if breast cancer has spread to the lymph nodes under the arm. While the complications from a sentinel lymph node dissection are less than that of a complete axillary lymph node dissection, sentinel lymph node dissection still carries small risks of arm swelling, decreased movement, fluid collections, nerve injury, and pain. Furthermore, the majority of sentinel lymph nodes do not contain cancer. The investigators hope to develop a method to find cancer in the axillary lymph nodes and avoid the complications of an operation.

This study will investigate optical tissue characteristics as a function of neoadjuvant breast cancer treatment. Our objective in this pilot study will be to identify diffuse optical spectroscopy parameters that change with treatment and that may correlate with pathological response. The ultimate goal is to use such parameters ultrasound as an early predictor of pathological partial or complete response in women with locally advanced breast cancer receiving treatment with neoadjuvant treatments such as chemotherapy or neoadjuvant combined modality chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The current study is a case control study involving comparisons of tissue interstitial fluid from breast cancer and adjacent non-cancerous tissue as well as that from benign breast lesion and its adjacent non-diseased tissue for a distinguishable breast cancer profile. The purpose of this research is to collect fresh breast nodule/cancer and surrounding non-cancerous tissue for proteomic studies of the interstitial fluid to identify a profile distinguishing breast cancer which will also permit future research on stored interstitial fluid, blood or tissue samples. Specific markers identified from interstitial fluid study will be investigated in blood samples to develop serum markers for breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Additionally, we will perform both prospective and retrospective research on breast cancer involving clinical, demographic, epidemiologic information, treatment, follow-up and outcomes on breast nodule/cancer cases collected.

The purpose of this study is to determine if new methods of MRI imaging can better measure participants' response to chemotherapy treatment.

A prospective multicentre study which aims to examine the relationship between intratumour heterogeneity (ITH) and pathological response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with histological confirmation of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) who are eligible for neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Study is enrolling newly diagnosed breast cancer patients about to start chemotherapy and age-matched control participants. The investigator is trying to better understand the prevalence of cognitive difficulties in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy compared to the general population as well as what biological mechanisms may play a role in the development of these difficulties. Patients will be asked to complete six assessments over the course of approximately 5 months. Assessments 1,3, 4.5 and 5 include computerized and paper and pencil cognitive testing as well as blood draws. Assessments 2 and 4 only involve the collection of a blood sample. An optional sub study is offered after Assessment 1. It involves a research brain MRI at Assessment 4.5 and cognitive testing and another research brain MRI at Assessment 6.

Intraoperative pathological diagnosis such as frozen section and imprint cytology is not routinely recommended in clinical practice because of time and accuracy concerns. Full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) is a new optical imaging technique that could generate sectioning tomogram from fresh tissue and provide close-to-pathology depiction of the morphological structure and pathological changes in minutes without conventional tissue preparation, slicing, and staining, and dynamic cell imaging (DCI) added the viability information of cells/tissue, which could be more important in cancer diagnosis. This study was to evaluate the feasibility and diagnostic value of FF-OCT and DCI in breast lesions and lymph node specimens during breast cancer surgery. We evaluated normal breast tissue, benign breast lesions, breast cancer and axillary lymph node specimens resected from patients undergoing breast surgery.