Breast Cancer

Women with HR+ breast cancer who remained premenopausal after receiving chemotherapy had a lower risk of disease recurrence when adding ovarian suppression to adjuvant exemestane or-to a lesser extent-tamoxifen, compared with standard tamoxifen alone, according to results from the phase III SOFT trial.

The addition of bevacizumab (Avastin) to standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy significantly improved pathologic complete response (pCR) rates in women with basal-like breast cancer compared with non-basal-like subtypes.

Nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) proved markedly more effective than conventional paclitaxel as part of a neoadjuvant regimen for patients with high-risk early breast cancer in a large German study presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Edith A. Perez, MD, the deputy director at large for the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, discusses the potential for immune checkpoint blockage as treatment for patients with advanced breast cancer.

The PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab has demonstrated promising clinical activity with an acceptable safety profile in heavily pretreated patients with recurrent metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.

The addition of the investigational PI3K inhibitor pictilisib to fulvestrant in patients with metastatic breast cancer yielded some intriguing findings in the phase II FERGI study.

Among HER2-positive breast cancer patients treated with chemotherapy alone, women with high levels of stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes had an 80% lower likelihood of disease recurrence compared to those with lower TIL counts.

Physicians' Education Resource®, LLC (PER®), to Sponsor Innovative CME Conference for Breast Cancer Specialists

Lisa A. Carey, MD, the Division Chief of Hematology and Oncology at the University of North Carolina and the Physician-in-Chief at North Carolina Cancer Hospital, discusses triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and the importance of understanding how it differs from other types of breast cancer.

Based on a current laboratory research project, Zarah Dulce F. Lucas, MD, discusses microRNAs and their potential to predict brain metastases in patients with triple-negative and HER2-positive breast cancer.

PARP inhibitors represent an exciting new class of anticancer agents and are currently being evaluating in phase III for a number of different indications.

Adding 1-year of adjuvant trastuzumab to chemotherapy continues to demonstrate an improvement in overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) for patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer

Treatment with the antibody-drug conjugate T-DM1 (ado-trastuzumab emtansine; Kadcyla) has demonstrated promising clinical efficacy with lower toxicity across a variety of settings for patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer when compared with standard therapies.

Frontline treatment with neratinib in combination with paclitaxel demonstrated similar ORR and PFS as the combination of trastuzumab and paclitaxel while lowering the incidence of CNS metastases in patients with locally recurrent or metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

Those of us who have treated patients with breast cancer for any extended period of time can likely share anecdotes about watching the treatment of this disease evolve to levels many of us could only have imagined when we began practicing.