BREAST CANCER

An ongoing clinical trial has begun the process of evaluating whether the addition of a booster agent can take the anticancer activity of PD-1 directed immunotherapy to another level.

Julia White, MD, professor of Radiation Oncology, Ohio State University, discusses the pros and cons of multi-gene assays when trying to determine the risk of local recurrence in patients with breast cancer.

Verma says one of the major new understandings of the disease is that the HER2 receptor needs to be suppressed at all times within the treatment paradigm of the malignancy.

​Elizabeth Mittendorf, MD, PhD, associate professor, Department of Surgical Oncology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses an upcoming peptide vaccine to prevent recurrence in patients with breast cancer.

Partridge says that the current school of thought is younger women should be treated the same as older women with breast cancer, though younger women tend to develop more aggressive breast cancer with more nodal involvement.

Perou says this research also found three expression subtypes within lobular breast cancer, one of which showed a proliferative phenotype and portended a slightly worse prognosis.

Boughey says an ongoing national clinical trial is looking at patients with ER+ breast cancer and treating them with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy.

Partridge says there continues to be a growing epidemic of women getting a bilateral mastectomy for unilateral breast cancer. These surgeries include women who are not at high-risk.

Vitamin D deficiency could lead to a quickly growing primary tumor and a hastened development of metastases for patients with breast cancer, according to researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Eribulin combination strategies are based on scientific evidence, rather than empirical evidence, and could provide a new chemotherapy-based backbone in the treatment paradigm of the malignancy, according to Christopher Twelves, MD.

Whitworth says that while it is generally perceived that the ER-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer patient population is the luminal subtype, 1 of every 5 of those patients would actually considered basal subtype.

Bear discusses studies adding treatments to chemotherapy in order to increase the pathological complete response (pCR) rate and the difficulties of translating those benefits into better overall survival (OS) rates for patients with breast cancer.

Winer says patients who do well on carboplatin and show both a good pathologic complete response and good disease free survival may be patients who have refractory disease and are responding well to the treatment, while others may be patients who were bound to do well regardless.

Seidman says currently there is not a HER2 histochemical test for gene amplification or signatures to best select patients for either CDK46 or MTOR inhibitor, as well for PI3 kinase inhibition.

An adjuvant combination of trastuzumab (Herceptin) and paclitaxel could change the treatment paradigm for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, according to Kimberly L. Blackwell, MD.

Triple Negative Breast Cancer with Andrew Seidman, MD and Joyce O'Shaughnessy, MD

Palbociclib (Ibrance) has been approved by the FDA for use in combination with fulvestrant in pretreated patients with HR-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.