Harold Burstein, MD, PhD shares key highlights of research advances in breast cancer from the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual conference #ASCO22 .
I'm Dr. Harold Burstein from Dana Farber Cancer Institute and I'm happy to share with you some of the highlights from our recently concluded Asco 2022 meeting focusing first on new exciting discoveries in breast cancer management. Two very important studies looked at existing drugs that we use in different subsets of breast cancer and began to show how they may have crossover potential. The first was the destiny breast 04 study which looked at a drug called in her to or trust is a mob directs taken. This is an antibody drug conjugate where the antibody targets the her two protein and then it's linked to a chemotherapy moy tea and sort of sort of delivers the chemotherapy to the tumor area because of the antibody. We already used this drug in the management of her two positive breast cancers. And the question asked in the Destiny breast oh for study was will this drug have activity outside of tumors traditionally thought to be heard to positive in particular. Would it be active in women whose tumors were so called her too low? Now this is an important group because actually 55% of women with metastatic breast cancer have tumors that are her too low. So this is a much more common problem. They compared this drug against standard chemotherapy as second or third line treatment for advanced breast cancer and they showed impressive results. There was a higher response rate with the trash can there was a longer time to tumor progression and there was an improvement in overall survival. Now the experience of getting this drug is fundamentally like getting that of chemotherapy. It's an intravenous treatment. It does have clear side effects including nausea, loss of hair, low blood counts and fatigue. But for women with the most common kinds of breast cancer this is clearly an important step forward. And interestingly this study actually included a good number of women who had tumors that we would traditionally say we're triple negative E. R. Negative and her to essentially negative. And in that group of patients there was also very robust activity suggesting that trust is a direct stick and will move from a her to only population to a much broader group of women with advanced breast cancer including both er positive her too low and many women who have triple negative breast cancer. The second study also looked at an antibody drug conjugate this one called separatism ab Govt can. This is the so called tropics. Oh to study separatism of course is approved for triple negative breast cancer. And we know that in 2nd and 3rd line treatment there it was very active and again outperformed a dealer's choice of chemotherapy with improvements in survival. The question in the tropics. So to study was fundamentally similar to that in the Destiny breast oh for study that is to say with this antibody drug. Conjugate which works in a subset here. Triple negative breast cancer have broader applicability. So they compared this drug against standard chemotherapy and 2nd and 3rd line treatment of women with er positive her two negative breast cancers. The results there show that it's at least as good as our standard chemotherapy options though the improvement in progression free survival was statistically significant but clinically only a modest gain at around a month and a half. So it's not clear that that will be sufficient to get an FDA registration though it does look like the principal that these drugs which initially began as targeted for one group of breast cancer will have crossover capability. Looks to be holding true here as well. So a very interesting set of studies showing that these very selective antibody drug conjugate may be actually less selective than we imagined at baseline and creates all sorts of interesting opportunities for moving them forward in many different sets of breast cancer. For more information on these studies and other updates in breast cancer. Please see the Youtube link which is referenced on the screen now. Mhm.
