Marija Balic

Summary

The main focus of my research is evaluation of technologies for circulating tumor DNA analyses and its implementation in clinical trials for metastatic and early stage breast cancer patients. Thereby the greatest challenge is hormone receptor positive disease. The technologies encompass next generation sequencing with focus on known alterations and genomic changes, but also evaluation of new approaches for understanding therapy resistance. Findings from ongoing analyses of peripheral blood of metastatic breast cancer patients under different treatment lines will hopefully lead to individualisation of the treatment, better monitoring of response, and translation of novel resistance findings into both modulation in vitro and design of novel treatment trials. In early stage disease, collaborative research should lead to definition of most suitable technologies for identification of at risk patients, and tailored escalation of treatment in these cases.