Gina Battaglia, PhD

Although many drugs are under study for patients with metastatic breast cancer, there is a pressing need to establish methods of predicting response and improving drug delivery, and researchers are looking toward molecular imaging techniques to help reach those goals.

Combining estrogen receptor blockade with targeted cell-cycle inhibitors increases therapeutic options for postmenopausal women with ER-positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer, contributing to an evolving paradigm that is moving new regimens to the forefront of the treatment timeline.

Substantial clinical trial evidence supports the use of pathologic complete response (pCR) as a measure for evaluating neoadjuvant therapies for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, suggesting that preoperative treatment should be the standard of care

Recent research has shown that adding targeted agents to trastuzumab-based chemotherapy regimens in the adjuvant setting may not significantly improve outcomes in patients with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer.

Although no cytotoxic agents are currently correlated with specific subtypes of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), recent findings indicate that targeting genomic stability, antimetastatic mechanisms, and protein expression characteristics are promising approaches for future TNBC treatments.