HER2+ Breast Cancer

Tara Sanft, MD, assistant professor of Medicine, medical director of Adult Survivorship for Yale Cancer Center Survivorship Clinic, discusses sequencing of treatments for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

Treatment with nanoparticle albumin-bound nab-paclitaxel showed encouraging activity across different subgroups of patients with breast cancer, according to the results of a meta-analysis of several clinical trials.

Melanie E. Royce, MD, PhD, co-director, Protocol Review and Monitoring System, member, Women’s Cancers Research Program, associate professor of Medicine, University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses some of the progress currently being made in the field of HER2-positive breast cancer.

Mark D. Pegram, MD, director of the Breast Cancer Oncology Program at Stanford Medicine, discusses the ongoing phase II SOPHIA trial, which is comparing the combination of margetuximab plus chemotherapy with trastuzumab (Herceptin) in patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

Jenny C. Chang, MD, discusses the significance of molecular testing in breast cancer and how it will lead to an improvement in treatment approaches in 2017 and beyond.

Melanie E. Royce, MD, PhD, co-director, Protocol Review and Monitoring System, member, Women’s Cancers Research Program, associate professor of Medicine, University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses some of the advancements in the field of HER2-positive breast cancer.

Data from the phase II PERTAIN trial presented late last year at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium showed that adding an aromatase inhibitor (AI) to pertuzumab and trastuzumab extended progression-free survival by over 3 months versus trastuzumab plus an AI in patients with HER2-positive, HR-positive locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer.

The Fc-modified monoclonal antibody margetuximab in combination with chemotherapy may offer a new treatment option for patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.

Anti-HER2 DC1 vaccination was demonstrated to be a safe and immunogenic treatment to induce tumor-specific T-cell responses in patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

Kevin Kalinsky, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, discusses a phase I study of ruxolitinib (Jakafi) in combination with trastuzumab (Herceptin) in metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

Alberto J. Montero, MD, Department of Hematology and Oncology at Cleveland Clinic, discusses the PERTAIN study in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-positive, locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer. The study looks at the impact of adding pertuzumab (Perjeta) to trastuzumab (Herceptin) in aromatase inhibitor (AI) therapy.

Nab-paclitaxel provides more benefits than paclitaxel for certain subsets of patients with breast cancer.

A prophylactic treatment of loperamide plus budesonide reduced the rate of grade 3 diarrhea associated with neratinib.

An investigation of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor lapatinib plus whole-brain radiotherapy has entered into a phase II trial in the treatment of patients with brain metastases from HER2-positive breast cancer.

The phase II HERMIONE trial was halted after the antibody-drug conjugate MM-302 combined with trastuzumab failed to improve progression-free survival versus chemotherapy plus trastuzumab in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who had previously received trastuzumab, pertuzumab, and ado-trastuzumab emtansine.

Aleix Prat, MD, PhD, head of the Department of Medical Oncology, the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute, discusses the results of the open-label PAMELA trial, in which the HER2-enriched subtype predicted pathologic complete response to targeted treatment in patients with HER2-positive, hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.

Mothaffar F. Rimawi, MD, associate professor and medical director at the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center at the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine, discusses the findings of the NSABP B-52 trial, which explored the addition of neoadjuvant estrogen deprivation therapy to docetaxel and carboplatin plus the HER2 inhibitors trastuzumab (Herceptin) and pertuzumab (Perjeta) as treatment for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

Ricardo H. Alvarez, MD, MSc, director of Cancer Research, breast medical oncologist, Southeastern Regional Medical Center, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, discusses updated findings regarding the mechanism of action with eribulin mesylate (Halaven) and how it impacts patients with HER2-negative breast cancer.

Prophylactic treatment with the combination of loperamide and budesonide reduced the rate of grade ≥3 diarrhea associated with neratinib to 15% compared with 39.9% observed in the ExteNET trial.

A biomarker analysis of participants in a phase II breast cancer trial demonstrated potential for identifying tumor markers to predict susceptibility to specific therapies.

The HER2-enriched subtype of HER2-positive breast cancer is a strong predictor of sensitivity to dual HER2 blockade without the use of chemotherapy.

The addition of an aromatase inhibitor (AI) to pertuzumab and trastuzumab improved progression-free survival by 3.09 months, when compared with trastuzumab plus an AI.

Higher levels of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes were associated with improvements in overall survival for patients with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer treated with docetaxel, trastuzumab, and pertuzumab in the phase III CLEOPATRA trial.

Lisa Carey, MD, associate director, Clinical Research, UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Richardson and Marilyn Jacobs Preyer Distinguished Professorship for Breast Cancer Research, UNC-Chapel Hill, discusses the ongoing progress with agents in development for the potential treatment of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

There are a wide variety of novel agents currently being investigated in the neoadjuvant setting for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.