Comparison of Risk Stratification by CanAssist Breast Test Performed on Core Needle Biopsies Versus Surgical Specimens in Hormone Receptor-Positive, Her2-Negative Early Breast Cancer

Introduction Core needle biopsies (CNB) are being increasingly utilized for biomarker, prognostic, and predictive testing in breast cancer (BC). CanAssist Breast (CAB) is a prognostic test performed to assess the 'risk of breast cancer recurrence' in early-stage hormone receptor-positive, Her2-negative BC patients. CAB segregates tumors as 'low risk' or 'high risk' for distant recurrence. Risk assessment done by CAB aids in planning and making adjuvant chemotherapy or hormone therapy decisions. CAB is typically performed on surgical specimens (SS). However, performing it on CNB does offer additional insights into tumor biology leading to different strategies for treatment planning; hence, we aimed to compare the risk stratification performance of CAB using CNB versus SS. Method We analyzed 103 paired formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded CNB and SS samples from hormone receptor-positive, Her2-negative early BC tissue samples submitted for performing CAB at OncoStem Diagnostics between November 2021 and September 2023. Concordance on 'risk categories' of CAB performed on CNB versus SS was reported using overall percentage agreement and Pearson correlation coefficient. Results We found excellent overall concordance of 92.2% for CAB risk stratification between paired CNB and SS tumor samples with a strong Pearson correlation coefficient of r= 0.8351 (p< 0.0001) when either SS or CNB was used as the gold standard. In prognostic testing patients with a 'low risk' of recurrence may avoid chemotherapy and hence it is crucial to assess the accuracy of CAB in the low-risk category. Additionally, in a real-world scenario, it is more likely that CAB will be performed on CNB first. Conclusion CAB when performed on CNB samples showed high concordance with SS thus demonstrating that CNB was a suitable sample for the CanAssist Breast test. The accuracy in the low-risk category is 97.5%, which ensures that physicians can reliably use prognostic information by testing CNB to guide adjuvant therapy decisions.