At the beginning of July of 2018, the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) has commissioned to the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) to provide an assessment of potential harm and benefits of biomarker-based tests for or against adjuvant chemotherapy in primary breast cancer to understand its efficacy in comparison with the previous standard examinations in women who do not require chemotherapy due to a low/intermediate risk of relapse.
Previously, the IQWiG has conducted a research on the current state of medical knowledge on biomarker-based breast cancer tests and submitted the results to the G-BA in December 2016 as a final report. However, there was no data on the benefit or harm of a biomarker-based strategy for the decision for or against adjuvant chemotherapy in primary breast cancer. Thus, the further evaluation has been pointed out.
Interestingly, that the IQWiG has collected and evaluated the medical knowledge on very different biomarker tests available on the market despite the type of analytical methods used (immunohistochemistry, gene expression analysis or an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) etc.).
The G-BA will include the new findings into the final report, which is expected to be released in the 4th quarter of 2018.
See full details in German here.
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