New breast cancer study has Illinois connections

A big new nationwide study on personalizing breast cancer treatment has Illinois connections.

Loyola University Medical Center and the University of Chicago are among the nearly 20 centers involved. And Lake County's Abbott Labs makes one of the experimental drugs used in the study.

The research announced Wednesday in Washington is called the I-Spy 2 study. It's a public-private partnership involving the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and drug companies.

The idea is to identify biomarkers unique to each women's cancer and to match new drugs to those markers. Women involved will get the drugs to shrink tumors before surgery.

Loyola's Dr. Kathy Albain says the results could be enormously helpful, especially for women with aggressive tumors.