Breast Cancer

Almost half of patients with high-risk luminal-B breast cancer converted to a low risk of recurrence following chemotherapy-free neoadjuvant therapy, matching the performance of standard chemotherapy in small randomized trial.

The presence of circulating tumor DNA and circulating tumor cells following neoadjuvant chemotherapy can be an independent predictor of disease recurrence in patients with early triple-negative breast cancer.

Residual cancer burden after neoadjuvant chemotherapy has been shown to be an accurate long-term predictor of disease recurrence and survival across all breast cancer subtypes.

The addition of encequidar (HM30181A) to oral paclitaxel is the first oral taxane regimen to result in an improvement in overall response rates as compared with an intravenous administration of paclitaxel in patients with metastatic breast cancer.

Estrogen alone as menopausal hormone therapy was found to decrease breast cancer incidence in postmenopausal women.

Karen Pinilla Alba, MD, discusses the safety findings stages 1 and 2 of the phase II/III PARTNER trial in triple negative and/or germline BRCA-mutated breast cancer.

A durvalumab-based neoadjuvant regimen induced an impressive pathologic complete response rate in patients with triple-negative breast cancer.

Pierfranco Conte, MD, discusses the findings of the OlympiAD trial in BRCA-mutated HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.

Accelerated partial breast irradiation using intensity-modulated radiotherapy is not significantly different from whole breast irradiation in preventing recurrence in patients with low-risk early breast cancer.

Olaparib continued to show a numerical overall survival (OS) benefit with a favorable hazard ratio for OS versus chemotherapy in patients with BRCA-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer, according to an extended, exploratory follow-up analysis of the phase III OlympiAD trial.

Atezolizumab (Tecentriq) in combination with carboplatin and nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) did not lead to a statistically significant increase in pathologic complete response (pCR) rate compared with carboplatin/nab-paclitaxel alone in patients with early high-risk and locally advanced triple-negative breast cancer,

Maintenance durvalumab may improve outcomes versus chemotherapy in patients with triple-negative breast cancer or those with PD-L1–positive breast cancer across several subtypes, according to exploratory analyses from the phase II randomized SAFIR02-IMMUNO trial presented at the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

The aromatase inhibitor anastrozole maintained a preventive effect for postmenopausal women at high risk for breast cancer nearly 12 years after discontinuing treatment.

Patients with triple-negative breast cancer have greater rates of pathologic complete responses when pembrolizumab is added to neoadjuvant and adjuvant chemotherapy. Furthermore, these benefits are observed across patient subgroups, most notably in those patients with stage III and/or node-positive disease.

Real-world data for frontline palbociclib indicate that the positive progression-free survival data observed with the CDK4/6 inhibitor in the pivotal PALOMA-2 trial would likely translate to an overall survival benefit in patients with HR-positive/HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer

Sara A. Hurvitz, MD, associate professor of medicine and medical oncologist, University of California Los Angeles, discusses the use of antibody-drug conjugates in HER2-positive breast cancer.

Adding the novel oral fluoropyrimidine derivative S-1 to adjuvant endocrine therapy significantly improved invasive disease-free survival for Japanese patients with HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.

The FDA has approved 2 abbreviated new drug applications for everolimus (Afinitor) tablets for the treatment of patients with select malignancies.

Mark E. Robson, MD, provides a snapshot of the precision focus in breast cancer, as well as the emergence of biosimilars in the field.

Immunomedics has resubmitted its biologics license application to the FDA for sacituzumab govitecan for the treatment of patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer who have received ≥2 prior therapies for metastatic disease.

The UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has approved palbociclib in combination with fulvestrant for the treatment of female patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have received prior endocrine therapy.

Innovative clinical trials designed to exploit the explosion of data on the drivers of cancer are demonstrating value as tools to explore potential signals of efficacy across tumor types, according to oncology experts. These studies have become a feature of the drug discovery landscape in oncology and are likely to remain part of the fabric of clinical research in the genomic era.

Experts from West Cancer Center highlighted the exciting research being conducted at their institution.

Lee S. Schwartzberg, MD, FACP, discusses paradigm shifts in hormone receptor–positive breast cancer and triple-negative breast cancer.

We traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, for a State of the Science Summit™ on Breast Cancer, which featured insights from the Duke Cancer Institute faculty.