The antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) doubled progression-free survival compared with chemotherapy alone in patients with “HER2-low” metastatic breast cancer—ie, patients with low levels of HER2 expression. The agent also extended overall survival for patients with low levels of the HER2 receptor, regardless of hormone receptor status. These results could impact the way breast cancer is treated in about half of all breast cancers, for the first time incorporating patients with HER2-low disease as a subset that will benefit from a HER2-directed therapy such as T-DXd, experts predicted.

For advanced breast cancer that is hormone receptor–positive and HER2-negative, sacituzumab govitecan-hziy significantly reduced the risk of disease progression by 34% over physician’s choice of treatment, based on the results of the phase III TROPiCS-02 trial. The heavily pretreated patients in the study had received a median of three prior therapies for metastatic disease. The primary progression-free survival analysis of TROPiCS-02 and the first of three planned overall survival analyses were presented at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting by Hope S. Rugo, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

Based on guidance from biomarker screening, patients with low-grade luminal A–type breast cancer aged 55 and older may need endocrine therapy alone following breast-conserving surgery and may be able to avoid radiation therapy entirely, according to new research findings presented by Timothy Joseph Whelan, MD, FASCO, and colleagues at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting.

A survey of patients with metastatic breast cancer found that 83% of Black respondents were somewhat or very likely to consider clinical trial participation; however, 40% of those respondents reported that they had not been informed by their care team about the opportunity to enroll in a trial. The research will be presented by Walker et al at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting.

In the single-center phase II TUXEDO-1 trial of patients with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer, fam-trastuzumab-deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) showed efficacy in patients with active brain metastases, yielding intracranial responses in 73.3% of the population and a median progression-free survival of 14 months, according to Rupert Bartsch, MD, of the Medical University of Vienna, who presented the findings at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Breast Cancer Congress 2022.¹