Articles related to BREAST CANCER

This study analyzed 147 patients with hormone receptor-positive and HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer (HR+/HER2+ MBC) who received first-line chemotherapy and dual anti-HER2 therapy using a real-world registry dataset. The efficacy of adding endocrine therapy to dual anti-HER2 therapy after chemotherapy discontinuation was studied retrospectively. The researchers discovered that endocrine therapy resulted in statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in both PFS and overall survival outcomes. In the first-line treatment of HR+/HER2+ MBC, the current standard practice is to administer a CLEOPATRA trial-based regimen that includes taxane, pertuzumab, and trastuzumab until the best response is achieved and then discontinue chemotherapy. These findings, with a hazard ratio of 0.52 for overall survival with the addition of endocrine therapy, confirm that all patients with HR+/HER2+ MBC should receive endocrine therapy after achieving the best response with chemotherapy.

The National Cancer Database analysis highlights the difficulty in identifying a single time point before which primary surgery should be completed in patients with breast cancer. There were two major findings: (1) 12% of patients who had surgery more than 8 weeks after diagnosis had significantly lower overall survival, and (2) patients with lower socioeconomic status had a longer time to surgery.

A look into the results of a few patients that took part in a phase 1/2 trial at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City: a woman who had breast cancer for 23 years and gone through 12 lines of therapy and a man with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) since 2017. Both showed complete response to the novel vaccine.

A conversation with Sayeh Lavasani, MD, MS, a medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Cente, in Duarte, California, who discusses how clinical pathways are developed and used at the cancer center, how the pathways for patients with HER2-low breast cancer are utilized, recent updates in the HER2-low treatment landscape, the challenges and level of evidence needed to incorporate new therapeutic approaches into the clinical pathway, and the challenges and crafty balancing that’s needed between standardizing treatment decisions across the population and optimizing care for individual patients.

The approval is based on the findings of the DESTINY-Breast04 Phase III trial and follows the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use’s favorable recommendation. In the trial, Enhertu (trastuzumab deruxtecan) significantly decreased the risk of disease progression or death in patients with HER2-low metastatic breast cancer with hormone receptor (HR)-positive or HR-negative disease by 50% compared to the physician’s choice of chemotherapy. According to a blinded independent central evaluation, Enhertu had a median progression-free survival (PFS) of 9.9 months compared to chemotherapy patients’ PFS of 5.1 months (BICR). When compared to chemotherapy, Enhertu showed a 36% reduction in the risk of death, with a median overall survival (OS) of 23.4 months as opposed to 16.8 months.

Adjuvant olaparib (Lynparza) was linked with significantly longer life free of invasive or distant illness compared to placebo among patients with high-risk, HER2-negative early breast cancer and germline BRCA1 or BRCA2 pathogenic or possibly pathogenic mutations. Global patient-reported quality of life was not significantly impacted by olaparib.