The 43rd Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference promises to inspire riveting discussions and practical applications of some of the most important findings from recent breast cancer research, according to Hope S. Rugo, MD, FASCO.
“[There will be] exciting discussions that bring all the newest information to the forefront and apply them in talks and clinical sessions about challenging cases and the application of new information to those challenging cases in Meet the Professor sessions and debates, which highlight some of the controversial areas,” Rugo said in an interview with OncLive® ahead of the meeting.
In the interview, Rugo highlighted key presentation topics to look forward to at the meeting, including sessions on axillary node sampling, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) for HER2-positive and triple-negative disease, and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing. She also emphasized the importance of optimizing the application of new data to clinical practice, particularly in managing toxicities and defining treatment sequences.
Rugo is a professor in the Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research, division chief of Breast Medical Oncology, and the Women’s Cancers Program director at City of Hope in Duarte, California. She is also co-chair of the 43rd Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference.
OncLive will be covering the top insights and innovations throughout this year’s meeting, so check back on our site to dive deeper into the topics previewed below, and more!
OncLive: What presentations and conversations are you most excited to see and participate in at this year’s Miami Breast Cancer Conference?
Rugo: I'm excited about Miami Breast this year. We have some great talks and debates, which will be exciting and address some areas that come up every week when we're talking about patient management. The focus of Miami Breast is to take current and evolving information and apply it to clinical settings that we are struggling with all the time.
Sentinel Node Biopsy vs. TAD After Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for cN1 Disease
Presentation Time: Friday, March 6, 2026, 8:35-8:50 am EST
Rugo: One big area that will be discussed is: How do we manage axillary node sampling in patients after neoadjuvant chemotherapy? Eleftherios (Terry) Mamounas, MD, MPH, FACS, [of AdventHealth Cancer Institute in Orlando, Florida], will talk about sentinel node biopsy vs axillary dissection after neoadjuvant chemotherapy for patients who have node-positive disease. This is a big issue.
Patients who have an axillary node dissection and who may need radiation may have a lot of long-term, lifelong toxicities from radiation. Yet we want to optimize [treatment] outcomes for patients with the highest-risk disease in the early-stage setting. This will be a great talk that will take some of the most important emerging data and place it in the clinical setting.
Coffee Talk: Charting New Pathways with HER2 and TROP2 Therapies – From Early to Advanced Breast Cancer
Presentation Time: Friday, March 6, 2026, 9:50-11:20 am EST
Rugo: We also saw exciting data this past year using ADCs in the neoadjuvant and adjuvant settings, as well as in the first-line metastatic setting, for HER2-positive disease. And, the TROP2-directed ADCs sacituzumab govitecan-hziy [Trodelvy] and datopotamab deruxtecan-dlnk [Dato-DXd; Datroway] are moving…to the first-line setting for patients with triple-negative breast cancer [TNBC], [including] sacituzumab govitecan in combination with pembrolizumab [Keytruda] for patients with PD-L1–positive disease. For all these trials, we're trying to figure out how to place the new drugs into clinical practice and how to sequence these treatments.
In a discussion [I’m participating in] on the morning of Friday, March 6, we'll have Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, [of the University of Milan in Italy], and Paolo Tarantino, MD, PhD, [of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts], talking about the ADC data. Alastair Thompson, MD, MBChB, BSc, FRCS, FACS, [of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas], will talk about the implications in the surgical setting. Then we're going to take a common clinical scenario and have a debate about whether we should give the HER2-targeted ADC fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki [T-DXd; Enhertu] either in the neoadjuvant or adjuvant setting, or whether we should bridge these data to include [its use in] both [settings]. That will be fascinating and will help us understand a bit about the implications of these data and their applications to controversial clinical cases.
Brush up on your ADC knowledge before the session!
- Findings from a planned interim analysis of the phase 3 DESTINY-Breast05 trial (NCT04622319) showed the invasive disease–free survival benefit with T-DXd vs ado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla) in patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer who had residual invasive disease in the breast or axillary lymph nodes and a high risk of disease recurrence after neoadjuvant therapy.1
- Data from the phase 3 DESTINY-Breast11 trial (NCT05113251) presented at the 2025 ESMO Congress demonstrated that neoadjuvant T-DXd followed by paclitaxel, trastuzumab (Herceptin), and pertuzumab (Perjeta; THP) improved pathologic complete response rates vs dose-dense doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide plus THP in patients with high-risk, HER2-positive, early-stage breast cancer.2
- Findings from the phase 3 ASCENT-03 trial (NCT05382299), which were shared at the 2025 ESMO Congress, showed that first-line sacituzumab govitecan monotherapy reduced the risk of disease progression or death in a statistically significant fashion compared with chemotherapy in patients with locally advanced unresectable, or metastatic TNBC who were not eligible to receive PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors.4
ctDNA in Early-Stage Breast Cancer: Ready for Prime Time?
Presentation Time: Friday, March 6, 2026, 11:20-11:35 am EST
Rugo: In the long run, we want to optimize outcomes for our patients. One area that's come up a lot in conversations every week is: Should patients have ctDNA tests if they have high-risk, early-stage breast cancer or even early-stage, low-risk disease? Should we be monitoring ctDNA levels for minimal residual disease to change therapy? The problem is that we don't know what to do with a positive test, or even whether we can de-escalate therapy [in the event of] a negative test. Heather M. Parsons, MD, MPH, [of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington], will address this intricate, detailed, and confusing issue for us, which will be helpful to understand the current data and applications to the clinic, as well as ongoing trials.
The Patti Hennessy Patient Keynote Address
Presentation Time: Saturday, March 7, 2026, 11:30 am-12:00 pm EST
Rugo: The patient voice is, of course, very important for us, and we have always included, as a Patti Hennessy Memorial Lecture, the voice of the patient. This year, we're fortunate to have Kelly Shanahan, MD, talk to us as the Patti Hennessy Patient Keynote speaker. Dr Shanahan is a well-known patient advocate, a retired physician, and a patient suffering with metastatic hormone receptor [HR]–positive breast cancer. [She] is the president of the METAvivor Group, [which] funds a tremendous amount of breast cancer research every year.
Scientific Keynote Address
Presentation Time: Saturday, March 7, 2026, 12:00-12:30 pm EST
Rugo: Dennis Slamon, MD, PhD, [of the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California], will talk to us about his experiences as a researcher and breast cancer oncologist that have changed the shape of our treatment paradigms for patients with HER2-positive and HR-positive breast cancer.
GLP-1 Agonists and Breast Cancer: Metabolic Insights and Clinical Implications
Presentation Time: Friday, March 6, 2026, 11:50-12:05 am EST
Rugo: There are a lot of additional exciting talks about fertility management, management of brain metastases, and symptom management for patients who are receiving treatment for early-stage and metastatic breast cancer. There's even a talk about GLP-1 agonists and the metabolic issues associated with breast cancer, which is a fascinating area. [The use of GLP-1 agonists is a topic that] patients bring up to us all the time, and we're wondering how to apply these drugs in the best possible ways for patients with breast cancer. Neil M. Iyengar, MD, [of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia], has spent his career working on metabolic insights in the management of breast cancer, and he'll be talking about this area at Miami Breast.
What remaining questions about breast oncology will still be important to address following the meeting?
Rugo: One aspect of Miami Breast is that we talk about where we're lacking data and where we need more information to apply new technologies and treatments to clinical practice. There are many ongoing trials we're looking forward to, [which will provide] results about surgical management and how we manage the axilla, the best way to minimize toxicity and maximize outcome, and the application of radiation. For example: Do all patients need radiation? What are the right fields? How should we combine and sequence ADCs?
The use of ctDNA is an incredibly hot topic. How we apply novel agents into our clinical paradigm is also an ongoing question. As we have more treatments moving earlier in clinical practice, the phase 1b trials are becoming increasingly important because we use our best drugs earliest. All these are ongoing questions that we'll be continuing to address in the future, and we'll look for additional data over the course of the next year.
What is the importance of holding recurring meetings like Miami Breast?
Rugo: Recurring meetings give people a place to come together, talk about data, understand the implications of new information that's come up over the year between the last meeting and the current meeting, and highlight the applications and controversies in applying these data to clinical care. Also, importantly, [relatively] small meetings like this [give us] the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with our colleagues, see our friends, and interact [with each other] about new information and how we manage all aspects of patient care, including symptom management. We can also talk with our patients and advocates; that's an incredibly important part of this recurring meeting as well.
References
- Enhertu demonstrated highly statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in invasive disease-free survival vs. T-DM1 in DESTINY-Breast05 phase III trial in patients with high-risk early breast cancer following neoadjuvant therapy. News release. AstraZeneca. September 29, 2025. Accessed March 5, 2026. https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2025/enhertu-improved-idfs-in-early-bc-in-db-05.html
- Harbeck N, Modi S, Pusztai L, et al. DESTINY-Breast11: neoadjuvant trastuzumab deruxtecan alone (T-DXd) or followed by paclitaxel + trastuzumab + pertuzumab (T-DXd-THP) vs SOC for high-risk HER2+ early breast cancer (eBC). Ann Oncol. 2025;36(suppl 2):S302-S303. doi:10.1016/j.annonc.2025.08.720
- Tolaney S, Jiang Z, Zhang Q, et al. Trastuzumab deruxtecan (T-DXd) + pertuzumab (P) vs taxane + trastuzumab + pertuzumab (THP) for first-line (1L) treatment of patients (pts) with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–positive (HER2+) advanced/metastatic breast cancer (a/mBC): interim results from DESTINY-Breast09. J Clin Oncol. 2025;43(suppl 17):LBA1008. doi:10.1200/JCO.2025.43.17_suppl.LBA1008
- Cortés JC, Bardia A, Punie K, et al. Primary results from ASCENT-03: a randomized phase III study of sacituzumab govitecan (SG) vs chemotherapy (chemo) in patients (pts) with previously untreated advanced triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) who are unable to receive PD-(L)1 inhibitors (PD-[L]1i). Ann Oncol. 2025;36(suppl 2):S1565-S1566. doi:10.1016/j.annonc.2025.09.030
- Kalinsky K, Schmid P, de Azambuja E, et al. Safety analysis of phase 3 ASCENT-04 study of sacituzumab govitecan + pembrolizumab vs chemotherapy + pembrolizumab for previously untreated PD-L1+ metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. Presented at: 2025 San Antonio Breast Cancer Conference; December 9-12, 2025; San Antonio, TX. Abstract PS5-02-28.
- Dent RA, Shao Z, Schmid P, et al. First-line datopotamab deruxtecan (Dato-DXd) vs chemotherapy in patients with locally recurrent inoperable or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) for whom immunotherapy was not an option: primary results from the randomised, phase 3 TROPION-Breast02 trial. Ann Oncol. 2025;36(suppl 2):S1566-S1567. doi:10.1016/j.annonc.2025.09.031
