Breast Cancer

Ruth O’Regan, MD, division head, Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, discusses the role of chemotherapy as treatment continues to advance in breast cancer.

Terry L. Evans, MD, discusses the impact of CDK4/6 inhibitors in the metastatic breast cancer space and challenges that still need to be addressed.

African-American patients with early breast cancer had worse outcomes than Caucasian patients following adjuvant therapy, despite having a similar risk of recurrence and receiving similar types of therapy, according to subgroup analysis of the phase III TAILORx trial.

Chemotherapy for breast cancer caused significantly more acute symptoms as compared with endocrine therapy, although the adverse effects of endocrine therapy increased over time.

Chimeric antigen receptor T cells targeting the tyrosine kinase receptor ROR1 can be transferred into patients safely and the cells expand in vivo.

Early-stage breast cancer survivors who completed a telephone-based lifestyle intervention program lost weight and tended to have higher rates of disease-free survival.

The combination of olaparib and durvalumab in patients with HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer with germline BRCA mutations is well tolerated and has promising activity, especially in earlier settings.

Younger patients with breast cancer who underwent lumpectomy had better quality of life than women who had a mastectomy.

Women who took part in a supervised exercise program during adjuvant treatment for breast cancer had better cardiovascular function than women who did not participate in the program.

The combination of palbociclib and trastuzumab demonstrated safety and efficacy in patients with advanced estrogen receptor–positive/HER2-positive breast cancer.

Oxybutynin helped to reduce the frequency and intensity of hot flashes among women who could not take hormone replacement therapy in survivorship.

Combining the BCL-2 inhibitor venetoclax with endocrine therapy elicited notable activity with a tolerable safety profile in patients with estrogen receptor–positive and BCL-2–positive metastatic breast cancer.

Laura Spring, MD, medical oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, discusses the association between pathologic complete response (pCR) and neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Roberto A. Leon Ferre, MD, oncologist, Mayo Clinic, discusses the randomized trial evaluating the effectiveness of oxybutynin chloride in the management of hot flashes in patients with breast cancer at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Additional analyses from the SOLAR-1 study show that alpelisib, an investigational alpha-specific PI3K inhibitor, combined with fulvestrant extended progression-free survival compared with fulvestrant alone in patients with PIK3CA-mutant advanced breast cancer regardless of line of therapy or prior CDK4/6 inhibitor treatment.

U3-1402, an investigational antibody-drug conjugate targeting HER3, induced objective response in more than 40% of heavily pretreated patients with HER3-expressing breast cancer.

Axillary radiotherapy was associated with locoregional control comparable to that with axillary lymph node dissection in patients with early-stage breast cancer who had a positive sentinel lymph node biopsy.

Accelerated partial breast irradiation following lumpectomy was marginally not found to be equivalent to whole breast irradiation to control ipsilateral breast tumor recurrence.

A longer duration of chemotherapy exposure was possible in patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer who received trilaciclib, an investigational CDK4/6 inhibitor, in addition to gemcitabine and carboplatin (GC) compared with GC alone.

The use of low-dose tamoxifen was shown to significantly reduce the risk of new and recurrent disease following surgery in women diagnosed with breast intraepithelial neoplasia but it did not cause more serious adverse events compared with placebo.

The use of circulating tumor-cell counts demonstrated strong value for selecting endocrine therapy versus chemotherapy for patients with estrogen receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.

Francois-Clement Bidard, MD, PhD, professor, medical oncologist, Institut Curie, discusses the clinical utility of circulating tumor cell count (CTC) in breast cancer at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Frank A. Vicini, MD, radiation oncologist, 21st Century Oncology of Michigan, compares the use of partial breast irradiation (PBI) with that of whole breast irradiation (WBI) in women with early-stage breast cancer at the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Improvements observed in progression-free survival and overall survival with the addition of first-line atezolizumab to nab-paclitaxel in patients with metastatic triple negative breast cancer or inoperable locally advanced TNBC are exclusive to those patients with PD-L1 expression ≥1% in immune cells.

Delayed treatment with chemotherapy of more than 30 days after surgery for patients with triple-negative breast cancer is associated with worse survival rates and outcomes than those who receive adjuvant chemotherapy within 30 days of their procedure.