San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

Adding carboplatin to neoadjuvant chemotherapy improves disease-free survival significantly in women with triple-negative breast cancer but not HER2-positive breast cancer.

Pat Whitworth, MD, medical oncologist at the Nashville Breast Center, discusses the prospective neo-adjuvant NBRST study, which looked at BluePrint functional subtyping versus conventional immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in breast tumors.

Matthew Goetz, MD, medical oncologist, professor of Oncology, associate professor of Pharmacology, andprofessor of Pharmacology at Mayo Clinic, discusses a phase III study looking at capecitabine (Xeloda) in patients with residual breast cancer following neoadjuvant chemotherapy and surgery.

Treatment with the PD-L1 inhibitor avelumab demonstrated promising overall response rates for patients with PD-L1–positive metastatic breast cancer, particularly for those with triple-negative disease.

Premenopausal women with high-risk breast cancer of the luminal A subtype derive no benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy.

A follow-up analysis of the benefits of adding denosumab to aromatase inhibitor therapy has found that the agent not only helps to prevent fractures, it reduces the risk of recurrence and death in postmenopausal women with HR-positive breast cancer.

Adding capecitabine to adjuvant therapy reduced the risk of disease recurrence by 30% and prolonged survival by 40% for patients with residual breast cancer following neoadjuvant chemotherapy and surgery.

Beth Overmoyer, MD, director, Inflammatory Breast Cancer Program, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, speaks on treatment challenges of inflammatory breast cancer.

William J. Gradishar, MD, Betsy Bramsen Professorship of Breast Oncology, Professor in Medicine-Hematology/Oncology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, discusses the BOLERO-1 Trial.

As few as five pounds of weight loss can make a significant difference for patients with triple-negative breast cancer, says Rowan Chlebowski, MD, PhD, a medical oncologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

A 12-gene test for breast cancer recurrence after ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) distinguished high- and intermediate- risk patients from those with a low risk

Findings from a long-term analysis of the Women's Intervention Nutrition Study (WINS) show that the deaths of women with hormone receptor–negative breast cancers were reduced by up to 54% when they followed a program to reduce their dietary fat intake, which could provide benefit for patients with triple-negative breast cancer.

Frontline treatment with everolimus (Afinitor) combined with trastuzumab (Herceptin) and paclitaxel failed to delay disease progression versus trastuzumab and paclitaxel alone in patients with HER2-positive advanced breast cancer

Fulvestrant (Faslodex) improved overall survival (OS) by 5.7 months compared with anastrozole as a frontline treatment for postmenopausal women with HR-positive metastatic breast cancer

Rita Nanda, MD, assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the Breast Medical Oncology Program at the University of Chicago, discusses the potential of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). A recent small-scale trial showed treatment response for 18.5% of patients with PD-L1 positive TNBC.

Older patients with moderate- or high-risk breast cancer had a similar disease-free survival with the bisphosphonate therapy ibandronate alone or in combination with capecitabine.

Five years of tamoxifen continues to offer protection against breast cancer, reducing the risk of breast cancer by 29% in otherwise healthy women at high risk of the disease who have been followed now for 16 to 22 years.

Women with HR+ breast cancer who remained premenopausal after receiving chemotherapy had a lower risk of disease recurrence when adding ovarian suppression to adjuvant exemestane or-to a lesser extent-tamoxifen, compared with standard tamoxifen alone, according to results from the phase III SOFT trial.

The addition of bevacizumab (Avastin) to standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy significantly improved pathologic complete response (pCR) rates in women with basal-like breast cancer compared with non-basal-like subtypes.

Nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) proved markedly more effective than conventional paclitaxel as part of a neoadjuvant regimen for patients with high-risk early breast cancer in a large German study presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Edith A. Perez, MD, the deputy director at large for the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, discusses the potential for immune checkpoint blockage as treatment for patients with advanced breast cancer.

The PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab has demonstrated promising clinical activity with an acceptable safety profile in heavily pretreated patients with recurrent metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.

The addition of the investigational PI3K inhibitor pictilisib to fulvestrant in patients with metastatic breast cancer yielded some intriguing findings in the phase II FERGI study.

Among HER2-positive breast cancer patients treated with chemotherapy alone, women with high levels of stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes had an 80% lower likelihood of disease recurrence compared to those with lower TIL counts.

Charles L. Shapiro, MD, professor, College of Medicine, The James, Ohio State University Comprehensive Care Center, discusses the underutilization of preventative drugs for breast cancer.

Martine Piccart, MD, PhD, director of medicine at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium, gives an update on a four-year follow-up analysis of the NeoALTTO trial.