Posts tagged ‘San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium’
At the recent San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), the clinical evaluation of pertuzumab and trastuzumab (CLEOPATRA) clinical trial results were presented by Dr José Baselga (Massachusetts General Hospital).
This study combined two anti human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) monoclonal antibodies, trastuzumab and pertuzumab with docetaxel.
Results showed a median progression-free survival of 18.5 months in the pertuzumab plus trastuzumab plus docetaxel group as compared to 12.4 months in the control group that received placebo plus trastuzumab plus docetaxel.
In other words the addition of pertuzumab improved PFS by 6.1 months. As Sally Church writing on Pharma Strategy Blog noted in her second update from SABCS, this is “another stunning six month leap in survival.”
The two monoclonal antibodies have different mechanisms of action and as Sally discusses in her post,
“the idea behind combining pertuzumab and trastuzumab upfront is to enable a more comprehensive shutdown of the HER2 pathway and delay the resistance setting in.”
You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog. There was a lot of new data presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium this year, and seeing the improvement in patient survival from BOLERO-2 and CLEOPATRA is what all those involved in the industry live for.
Sally poignantly describes this in her summary of SABCS:
“This year’s San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium was very uplifting and one of the more exciting meetings of the last five years.”
Please contact us If you are interested in learning more about the breast cancer market and the impact new products in development such as the antibody drug conjugate T-DM1 and HDAC inhibitor, entinostat may have.
Updated results from the BOLERO-2 (breast cancer trials of oral everolimus) were presented at the recent San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS).
José Baselga had previously presented the impressive results at ECCO/ESMO 2011 in Stockholm.
As Sally Church noted on Pharma Strategy Blog in her second update on “what’s hot at SABCS”:
“The trial data presented by Dr Gabriel Hortobagyi (MDACC) confirmed that the responses continue to be durable, with an improvement in PFS with the combination arm now up to 11.0 months, up from 10.6 months at ECCO. The results for the exemestane control arm remained at 4.1 months.”
The extra 6.9 months of survival benefit shown with exemestane plus the mTOR inhibitor everolimus is good news for advanced breast cancer patients.
One of the problems associated with aromatase inhibitor (AI) therapy in breast cancer is that patients develop resistance over time. As Sally notes,
“The rationale behind this trial is that mTOR is a known cause of resistance to AI therapy, so the combination targets both the estrogen receptor and mTOR adaptive resistance pathway.”
You can read more on Pharma Strategy Blog about the BOLERO-2 trial presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and why this was a rationally designed study based on solid science.
Deserted River Walk due to San Antonio cold weather
If you are interested in news from the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) then Sally Church, PhD has a number of reports on Pharma Strategy Blog that are worth reading.
SABCS Video Preview
In her preview of the SABCS meeting (that you can also watch below), Sally reviews some of the BOLERO-2, CLEOPATRA and NEOSPHERE clinical trials, and what impact positive data may have on breast cancer patients. It is well worth watching.
SABCS Twitter Coverage
Although there is no wifi in the meeting rooms at SABCS, a few scientists, patients advocates and physicians are tweeting from the meeting including @drsteventucker and @teamoncology. You can easily follow the twitter conversation and check-out what’s been said through the #SABCS aggregator on Pharma Strategy Blog. As Sally would say, “check it out!”
As an example of how effective social media can be to share information, Pieter Droppert (@3NT) used storify to share some of the insights posted on twitter during the SABCS plenary lecture he attended on potential of macrophages as breast cancer drug development targets.
Breast Cancer and the Environment
Pieter also commented on the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on “Breast Cancer and the Environment” which was somewhat disappointing to those hoping that it would highlight causal links.
Hot news at SABCS
This year the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium had a lot of exciting new data. Two papers on the BOLERO-2 and CLEOPATRA trial data was published during the meeting.
Some of the interesting early data presented at the meeting included work on Notch inhibition to reduce aromatase inhibitor resistance, HER2 mutants and targeting HER3. You can read more updates from Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Overall, this was one of the most interesting SABCS meetings of recent years with a good balance of science and clinical data.
Hopefully next year, there will be more discussants to put the data in context, as this would have made it an even better meeting.
There was a lot of interesting science at the recent AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics international conference in San Francisco.
In particular, the poster sessions offered the opportunity to discuss pre-clinical and early drug development work, and share insights into pathways and mechanisms of action. If you are in new product development, it’s a key meeting to attend.
What was the news at AACR molecular targets?
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog aggregated the live tweets from the joint AACR-NCI-EORTC meeting, although the absence of wifi in the plenary sessions meant that there were fewer tweets than might have been expected.
Sally has written about some of the data presented on breast cancer at the meeting. In her insightful post she reviews the Syndax data for entinostat in second-line ER/PR+ breast cancer, and also asks whether ALK is a new target in inflammatory breast cancer (IBC)?
From what was heard at the meeting, there will be a lot of new breast cancer data at the forthcoming San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) that Sally will also be attending.
More insights from AACR molecular targets will be available on Pharma Strategy Blog in the next few days.
Meanwhile on Biotech Strategy Blog, Pieter Droppert has written about some of the sessions he attended in San Francisco on:
- Overcoming barriers to new cancer drug development
- Improving cancer clinical trial design
- Prostate Cancer
Next year’s 2012 molecular targets meeting will be in Dublin, good news for all those who like Guinness!
Image Source: National Institutes of Health
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog has written about recent research in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).
She discusses a published study from Vanderbilt that identified six different subtypes of the disease; each subtype being sensitive to different drug therapies.
As Sally points out these subtypes could be used as a potential biomarker for patient selection into an appropriate clinical trial – yet another step in the direction of personalized medicine.
You can read more about this insightful research on Pharma Strategy Blog. Sally will be attending the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) later this year.
Published by Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog