Brufsky Recaps PALOMA-2 Study of Palbociclib in Black Patients with aBC

Adam Brufsky, MD, PhD, FACP, professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, associate division chief for the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's Department of Medicine, medical director of the Magee-Women's Cancer Program, associate director for clinical investigations at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, and co director of the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Center, discusses background and next steps of the phase 3 PALOMA-2 study (NCT01740427) which evaluated palbociclib (Ibrance) plus letrozole (Femara) in patients that identified as Black or Hispanic with advanced breast cancer.

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0:10 | What we did at San Antonio was we looked at the African American patients with metastatic breast cancer in this real-world analysis that we had done. There were [about] 270 African American patients; 127 had palbociclib and an aromatase inhibitor [AI] in that group; and 143 had an AI alone. They were pretty well-matched and the follow-up was a little bit less for the AI alone than the AI and palbociclib. But again, these were fairly straightforward with a median age of 64.

0:48 | The palbociclib and AI patients still had a little bit more de novo disease than those with AI alone, interestingly enough. The vast majority of patients started palbociclib with a typical dose of 125 mg a day, and all but about 15% started at lower doses, which is consistent with other large populations.

1:08 | There probably will never be randomized data. I think probably what we need to do is a meta analysis of all the large trials of ribociclib [Kisqali], abemaciclib [Verzenio], and palbociclib together. I think that's probably something a lot of us should do. We're now starting to see real-world analyses and data from abemaciclib and ribociclib, because again, those were approved later on. We didn't have the longer term follow-up, but now we do. I think that we're starting to see, especially in African American women and in the overall population, we're starting to see data. I’d love to start to see comparisons, if we could do them across all 3, to see if there are any true differences in progression-free and overall survival when we look at the real-world data.