Breast Cancer

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.

The PI3K pathway is the most frequently altered pathway in cancer, and its activation has been shown to confer resistance to endocrine and HER2-targeted therapies preclinically.

In May 2014, ASCO issued guidelines recommending the administration of adjuvant tamoxifen for 10 years in women with stage I-III hormone receptor (HR)-positive breast cancer, based on data from the collection of 5 clinical trials.

Treatment with eribulin mesylate improved overall survival of patients with triple-negative and HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer compared with standard chemotherapies.

Eleftherios Mamounas, MD, MPH, medical director, Comprehensive Breast Program, University of Florida Health Cancer Center, discusses the need to select patients for neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Substantial clinical trial evidence supports the use of pathologic complete response (pCR) as a measure for evaluating neoadjuvant therapies for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, suggesting that preoperative treatment should be the standard of care

Katharine Yao, MD, director, breast surgical program, NorthShore University HealthSystem, Evanston, Illinois, clinical associate professor, surgery, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, discusses a prospective study that analyzed the sources of information regarding decisions on contralateral prophylactic mastectomy.

Sandra M. Swain, MD, Medical Director of the Washington Cancer Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, discusses a taxane's impact on outcomes in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.

The FDA has expanded the approval of Lymphoseek (technetium Tc 99m tilmanocept) injection to include lymphatic mapping in solid tumors and sentinel lymph node (SLN) detection for breast cancer and melanoma

Clifford A. Hudis, MD, chief, Breast Cancer Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, professor of medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, discusses obesity and its relation to breast cancer.

The FDA has assigned a priority review designation to palbociclib in combination with letrozole as a frontline treatment for postmenopausal patients with ER-positive, HER2-negative advanced breast cancer.

Recent research has shown that adding targeted agents to trastuzumab-based chemotherapy regimens in the adjuvant setting may not significantly improve outcomes in patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer.