CANCERNETWORK: Dr. O’Shaughnessy, what are the current treatment options for women diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer? Let’s start with metastatic disease.
DR. O’SHAUGHNESSY: Metastatic cancer that is triple-negative is difficult to treat because our therapies are generally short-lived in their benefit, if they benefit patients at all. There is a subset of triple-negative metastatic patients who really don’t have responsive disease to any of our standard therapies. Our therapies are basically three, in my opinion, at the Level 1 evidence—where we have enough data from large phase III trials where we can say we know what the level of efficacy is—and that is 1) paclitaxel(Drug information on paclitaxel)-bevacizumab, 2) gemcitabine(Drug information on gemcitabine)-carboplatin, and 3) ixabepilone-capecitabine. These are the 3 options I think we have enough focused data on triple-negative breast cancer evidence to give them Level 1 evidence. There are a number of other agents we use such as the new drug eribulin which has a survival advantage in late-line metastatic breast cancer. That is certainly a reasonable option. And we certainly can use single-agent taxane as well, but those are the treatments that I think are most established for triple-negative breast cancer.
http://www.cancernetwork.com/conference-reports/mbcc2012/content/article/10165/2045206
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