Neoadjuvant treatment for early-stage breast cancer: opportunities to assess tumour response.

Primary, preoperative, or neoadjuvant chemotherapy was introduced in the early 1970s as part of an integrated therapeutic approach to treat inoperable locally advanced breast cancer. The approach resulted in high responses, and sufficient downstaging to allow mastectomy in some patients. In addition, a small number of pathological complete responders were reported. Gradually, the idea of preoperative chemotherapy was extended to include patients with large but operable early-stage breast cancer, with the possibility in some cases of downstaging the primary tumour to avoid mastectomy, and to allow breast-conserving surgery to be done. This approach allows the tumour to be used as a measure of treatment response in vivo. More recently, the possibility has opened up for neoadjuvant chemotherapy to provide information on the use of clinical, pathological, and molecular endpoints, which can be used as surrogate markers to predict long-term outcome in the adjuvant setting. In addition, the anatomical accessibility of the breast provides the potential for serial biopsies to investigate molecular changes during treatment.