Breast Cancer Highlights From ASCO 2024

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Adriana Kahn, MD, of the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut, discusses some of the top research in metastatic breast presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

I’m glad to be here at ASCO, because every year we come with lots of hopes for the future of research because we need changes for our patients with metastatic disease. Every ASCO we get excited with upcoming studies, not just the ones that are going to be performed, but most importantly results of the ones that have been performed.

And for metastatic breast cancer, we had lots of updates this year, which is exciting for all of our patients. Studies in the hormone-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancers specifically are of interest because that’s the largest population that we have with metastatic disease.

And we have great updates in the first-line setting with updates on inavolisib in addition to CDK4/6 inhibitors and endocrine therapy as a first-line therapy for patients with PI3 kinase mutations. This study showed that by adding PI3 kinase inhibitor to the standard of care CDK4/6 inhibitor and endocrine therapy, we can extend progression-free survival of those patients beyond just the first-line setting. So it confirms the results of what we already expected and what has been FDA approved.

We also had interesting data with the second-line setting, so patients who do first-line setting with CDK4/6 inhibitor and endocrine therapy. Moving to second line, we saw data from the postMONARCH study showing that if we add abemaciclib [Verzenio] to endocrine therapy with fulvestrant, we can extend progression-free survival beyond what we do with fulvestrant monotherapy, which is also an advance since patients had already been exposed to a CDK4/6 inhibitor. So this again, confirms prior studies with MAINTAIN, with ribociclib [Kisqali], and now we have abemaciclib as one more tool. And those are very interesting and promising data for patients.

And another update we had that was very interesting for a metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer is that, in the first-line setting we had a large Japanese non-inferiority study showing that eribulin [Halaven] is equivalent to, or at least non-inferior to, taxane chemotherapy in addition to trastuzumab [Herceptin] and pertuzumab [Perjeta]. So showing that we have one more chemotherapy option to give to work around adverse event profile for patient safe quality of life.

And we have interesting data on trastuzumab deruxtecan [Enhertu] that has now been shown to be active in the first-line setting. There’s monotherapy or in combination with pertuzumab in comparison to the standard of care with this trastuzumab-pertuzumab. So we still have preliminary data on that, but promising that that would be moving forward.

And beyond that we also had data on DESTINY-Breast06 showing the importance of trastuzumab drugs taken to patients with HER2-low, HER2-ultralow disease as being better than standard of care chemotherapy. So given another option now in the first-line chemotherapy setting for patients with hormone-positive HER2-low or -ultralow disease, which are very promising data. And we look forward to follow up of those studies and practice changing data.

Please enable JavaScript to view the

comments powered by Disqus.