The Latest News and Updates in Metastatic Breast Cancer

There have been several updates in the field of metastatic breast cancer over the last several weeks.

Here, CURE® looks back at some of the latest news and updates affecting patients with metastatic breast cancer.

• Metastatic breast cancer creates a high economic burden, especially among women aged 45 years to 64 years, through lost productivity, according to the results of a productivity cost analysis published in Cancer.
• The combination of pyrotinib plus Xeloda (capecitabine) provides a better progression-free survival (PFS) rate than Tykerb (lapatinib) plus Xeloda in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer (mBC) who were previously treated with Herceptin (trastuzumab) and chemotherapy, according to recent data.
• First-line treatment with Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in combination with chemotherapy improves progression-free survival in patients with locally recurrent, inoperable or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC), according to data presented at the 2020 ASCO Virtual Scientific Program.
• The phase 3 Impassion131 study — designed to evaluate the immunotherapy Tecentriq (atezolizumab) in combination with the chemotherapy paclitaxel in patients with PD-L1-positive metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) — failed to meet its primary endpoint of improving progression-free survival, compared with placebo plus paclitaxel.
• Recently, updated findings of the phase 2 HER2CLIMB study demonstrated that patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who developed brain metastases experienced a 52% reduction in the risk of death after receiving the combination of Tukysa (tucatinib), Herceptin (trastuzumab) and capecitabine.