SAN ANTONIO – Dr. Hope S. Rugo shared her insights on breast cancer research presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, focusing particularly on neoadjuvant treatments and immunotherapy.
“It’s exciting to think we may be able to treat patients with ER-positive and HER2-negative disease with a relatively limited course of a well-tolerated therapy,” Dr. Rugo said when discussing the results of a phase II trial evaluating neoadjuvant therapy with the antibody-drug conjugate trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1).
Furthermore, results from another arm within the same trial may help to identify which patients with triple-negative breast cancer can get by with less chemotherapy, and potentially avoid anthracyclines, said Dr. Rugo, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, in a video interview.
She also untangled the perplexing results from two trials presented evaluating neoadjuvant carboplatin, and discussed the highlights of immunotherapy research presented at the symposium.