Ivana Sestak, PhD, on Clinical Treatment Score From TAILORx: Predicting Distant Breast Cancer Recurrence
2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium
Ivana Sestak, PhD, of Queen Mary University of London and the Centre for Cancer Prevention, discusses study findings that confirm the prognostic ability of the Clinical Treatment Score at 5 years (CTS5) for late distant recurrence, specifically for patients older than 50 years and/or for those deemed to have intermediate- or high-risk hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative, node-negative breast cancer. The CTS5 is less prognostic in women younger than 50 who received 5 years of endocrine therapy alone (Abstract GS4-03).
Joseph Sparano, MD, of the Montefiore Medical Center, discusses three challenges:
- How can gene-expression profiles and other diagnostic tests be used to guide the use of adjuvant systemic therapy?
- Is it time to reappraise active surveillance?
- Are there diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that can identify tumors at highest risk of metastasis, and novel therapies that can block the spread of disease?
Ariella B. Hanker, PhD, of UT Southwestern Medical Center, discusses data showing that breast cancers expressing co-occurring HER2 and HER3 mutations may require the addition of a phosphoinositide 3-kinase alpha inhibitor to a HER2 tyrosine kinase inhibitor (Abstract GS6-04).
Nicholas C. Turner, MD, PhD, of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, discusses findings from the plasmaMATCH trial, which showed that circulating tumor DNA testing offers accurate tumor genotyping to identify patients with rare HER2 and AKT1 mutations and may enable matching them with targeted treatments (Abstract GS3-06).
Joerg Heil, MD, PhD, of the University Hospital Heidelberg, discusses findings on how accurately this technique can diagnose residual disease and pathologic complete response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer. These data may help tailor, de-escalate, and potentially avoid unnecessary surgeries (Abstract GS5-03).
Javier Cortes, MD, PhD, of the IOB Institute of Oncology, discusses study findings that suggested pembrolizumab offered a prolonged survival benefit compared to chemotherapy for a subset of patients with previously treated metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. In the trial, high tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes were significantly associated with better clinical outcomes with the checkpoint inhibitor.
