Day 5: Therapeutic strategies in the neoadjuvant setting

In the last general session of this year’s San Antonio breast cancer symposium, prof François Duhoux from the university hospital Saint Luc, Brussels, gave an excellent summary of five exciting topics.

Firstly, he discussed a phase 3 trial where platinum was added to sequential taxane-anthracycline neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with triple-negative breast cancer. Long-term survival data of the GeparOLA study where presented, comparing neoadjuvant paclitaxel/olaparib to paclitaxel/carboplatinum in patients with HER2-negative breast cancer and homologous recombination deficiency.

Further, there were two presentations on the use of checkpoint inhibitors. Outcomes of the neoadjuvant I-SPY 2 TRIAL evaluating anti-PD-1 cemiplimab plus anti-LAG-3 REGN3767 in early-stage, high-risk HER2-negative breast cancer were discussed. In this trial, they also tried to predict which patients are at risk for developing a serious immune-related adverse event to enable early consideration of optimal treatment choices.

The last presentation discussed here was on using the 70-gene MammaPrint test for prediction of extended endocrine therapy benefit in patients with early-stage breast cancer in the IDEAL trial.