Triple Negative Breast Cancer, "I Won't Back Down!": New Presurgery Combination Therapy May Improve Outcomes for Women With Triple-negative Breast Cancer

What is TNBC

WHAT IS TRIPLE NEGATIVE BREAST CANCER?

Just in recent years, Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) has sparked interest in the news where instead of calling the tumor as ER-negative, PR-negative, and HER2-negative; researchers began using the shorthand term, "Triple Negative," dubbed the "new type" of breast cancer. Being Triple Negative, you don't have a targeted therapy and your only treatment option is chemotherapy.

Triple Negative Breast Cancer is seen in about 15% of all breast cancers. TNBC is a very aggressive cancer that tends to strike younger women, pre-menopause, especially among African-American women and women who have BRCA1 mutations. The tumor tends to be fast growing and is less likely to show up on an annual mammogram. TNBC is more likely to metastasis early on; has a high rate of recurrence in the first 2-3 years from diagnosis and has a poorer prognosis than other types of breast cancer due to lack of specific, targeted treatment for TNBC.

Monday, January 20, 2014

New Presurgery Combination Therapy May Improve Outcomes for Women With Triple-negative Breast Cancer

December 13, 2013

"The I-SPY 2 trial, an innovative, multidrug, phase II breast cancer trial, has yielded positive results with the first drug to complete testing in the trial. Adding the chemotherapy carboplatin and the molecularly targeted drug veliparib to standard presurgery chemotherapy improved outcomes for women with triple-negative breast cancer, according to results from the I-SPY 2 trial presented here at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 10–14..."

Dr. Hope Rugo

“As the trial progresses, it learns how different tumor subtypes respond to distinct novel agents, and through the adaptive trial design, women are assigned with higher probability to therapies that are performing better for patients with their subtypes,” said Hope S. Rugo, M.D., professor of medicine and director of breast oncology and clinical trials education at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Francisco..."

http://www.aacr.org/home/public--media/aacr-in-the-news.aspx?d=3242
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