Prolonging Responses in Locally Advanced Breast Cancer

Joseph A. Sparano, MD, professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses a key point raised during a presentation for the 19th Annual School of Breast Oncology® around the treatment of locally advanced breast cancer.

With both local and systemic therapies in mind, Sparano explains that analyses of pathologic complete response are surrogate end points when it comes to locally advanced breast cancer. However, it can provide insight into how patients will response long-term.

Sparano further notes that for the subgroup of patients with residual disease, there is therapeutic potential to achieve an even better response.

Transcription

0:07 | the key principles that I touched upon, included the fact that pathologic complete response is a short term surrogate indicative of long term outcomes for patients with locally advanced breast cancer receiving systemic neoadjuvant chemotherapy. So that's point number one.

0:31 | Point number two is that achieving a pathologic complete response is associated with a favorable long term outcome. But in those who have residual disease, there are therapeutic options that can further improve outcomes. That would include, say the use of capecitabine being for patients with triple-negative disease or trust use of our T-DM1 for patients who have residual hurt to positive disease.

1:04 | The third major point to take away is the recent approval of pembrolizumab in addition to chemotherapy for patients who have triple negative breast cancer, which has been shown to improve the likelihood of achieving a pathologic complete response, and also improving event free survival.