Tailored Axillary Surgery With or Without Axillary Lymph Node Dissection Followed by Radiotherapy in Patients With Clinically Node-positive Breast Cancer (TAXIS)
1500 patients around the world
Available in Argentina
The removal of all lymph nodes in the armpit through conventional axillary dissection has
been standard care for all patients with breast cancer for almost a century. In the nineties,
the sentinel lymph node procedure, which involves the selective removal of the first few
affected lymph nodes, was introduced in clinical practice. Today, conventional axillary
dissection is still performed on many women with breast cancer that has spread to the nodes.
It is the cause for relevant morbidity in the form of lymphedema, impairment of shoulder
mobility, sensation disorders and chronic pain in as much as one third of all women
undergoing the procedure.
The TAXIS trial will evaluate the optimal treatment for breast cancer patients in terms of
surgery and radiotherapy. In particular, it will investigate the value of tailored axillary
surgery (TAS), a new technique that aims at selectively removing the positive lymph nodes.
TAS combines the removal of palpably suspicious nodes with the sentinel procedure. TAS is a
promising procedure that may significantly decrease morbidity in breast cancer patients by
avoiding surgical overtreatment.
This trial has the potential to establish a new worldwide treatment standard with hopefully
less side effects and a better quality of life, while keeping the same efficacy as provided
by radical surgery.
The main objective of the trial is to show that TAS and axillary radiotherapy (RT) is
non-inferior to ALND in terms of disease-free survival of node positive breast cancer
patients at high risk of recurrence in the era of effective systemic therapy and extended
regional nodal irradiation.