Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – "With approximately 13 patients potentially eligible each year, the average number of tests performed between 2024 and 2025 exceeded 2.500. It should be noted that the National Fund for Genomic Testing is no longer sufficient. Diagnoses are increasing, the number of eligible patients is growing, and we have learned to use this tool with maximum appropriateness: for this reason, we inevitably need the Fund to be increased."
With these words, Alessandra Fabi, national councilor of AIOM – the Italian Association of Medical Oncology and head of Precision Medicine in Senology at the Fondazione Policlinico Università Agostino Gemelli IRCCS in Rome, spoke during the press conference "Breast Cancer: The First Two Years of the National Observatory on Genomic Testing," promoted today in Milan by Abbott.
Fabi emphasizes the need that prompted the establishment of an Observatory on genomic testing: "It was necessary to evaluate and monitor what has been years of clinical and technical work," he explains. "The results are positive: the first message is that doctors have succeeded in bringing precision medicine to every hospital through genomic testing, learning to use it according to appropriate criteria in patients with already-operated, hormone-dependent, and HER2-negative early breast cancer, which represents approximately 60% of breast cancer cases."
From the numbers emerging from the Observatory, "we can say that the overall picture is very good," observes the AIOM councilor, "but we still have ample room for improvement, especially in some geographic areas where the number of tests performed and prescribed remains low."
A gap due to "cultural factors, such as the unfounded fear of wasting precious time before starting chemotherapy, when in fact the test allows half of the patients to avoid it altogether, but also to a complex hospital bureaucracy that slows down the work of individual clinicians."
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