Dr. DeMichele on Importance of Neoadjuvant Care in HER2+ Breast Cancer

Angela M. DeMichele, MD, professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania, discusses the importance of neoadjuvant treatment for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

The neoadjuvant setting holds a high level of importance for patients, DeMichele says, because it not only provides an opportunity to improve pathological complete response rates, but it allows oncologists to determine optimal, and personalized, treatment approaches for individual patients.

One of the benefits with the I-SPY2 program is that patients are not required to remain on a treatment long-term if there is no evidence of response. Oncologists can develop better techniques, such as MRI, to determine what additional therapies they can switch their patients to.