Looking Forward in the HER2-Positive Breast Cancer Space

Hatem Soliman, MD, medical oncologist in The Center for Women’s Oncology and assistant member of the Experimental Therapeutics Program at Moffitt Cancer Center, discusses some of the exciting research that is ongoing for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

The HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer space has had a variety of new therapies come into play in recent years, including pertuzumab (Perjeta) and trastuzumab (Herceptin).

Soliman highlights the impact of fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (Enhertu) for this patient population, based on findings from the DESTINY-Breast04 trial (NCT03734029), and his interest in moving the agent further in the the treatment paradigm.

Transcription:

0:10 | A lot of the research now that's exciting is in looking potentially at trastuzumab deruxtecan in HER2 being moved up further in the treatment paradigm in order to see if it can deliver a more potent benefit for patients, particularly like those that may have a specific amount of HER2 expression across the board, and for patients that are not just HER2-positive or overexpressing, but those with lower levels of HER2. We want to see if we can broaden that use over time.

0:48 | Also, there's some exciting data looking at its ability to potentially salvage patients with residual disease following neoadjuvant chemotherapy that are HER2-positive. We know that those patients can be at a little bit higher risk of relapse, and eventually develop metastatic disease. They're looking at whether the use of trastuzumab deruxtecan in those patients provides a superior cure rate. For those patients, I think that would be very exciting.

1:18 | At the end of the day, that would be the most bang for our buck. If we can cure more patients upfront with the most active drugs that we have in our arsenal, that will lead to the largest gain and improvement in outcomes for that population. I think there'll be exciting results in the months and years to come as the drugs are looked at in some of these different scenarios, to see where we can best apply them to get maximum effect.