Medical Oncology
Physician insights on cancer treatment protocols, immunotherapy, targeted therapies, and clinical trial updates.
Recent Discussions
Do you prefer using an anthracycline or non-anthracycline adjuvant regimen in BRCA+ premenopausal patients with localized HR+ breast cancer?
My choice of chemotherapy for localized BRCA+ breast cancer is guided by the patient's risk factors such as tumor grade, tumor size, presence or absence of lymphovascular invasion, number of lymph nodes involved, Oncotype dx result, and the patient's age. For small, node negative, HR+, HER2- breast ...
Would you treat a Stage I ER/PR positive HER2 negative breast cancer differently if it is associated with Lynch syndrome?
In reviewing the literature, there are a number of articles describing the risk of breast cancer in patients with Lynch syndrome such as this: (Nikitin et al., PMID 32547938). The cliff notes are that in patients with Lynch syndrome and certain mutations, there appears to be a small but definite inc...
How would you continue management of a patient with clinical stage II cN+ HR+ HER2+IDC with grade 3 diarrhea after 1 cycle of neoadjuvant TCHP?
Diarrhea is very common with TCHP, with about 70% of patients having diarrhea and 10% having diarrhea grade 3 or higher. Pertuzumab is the primary culprit, although diarrhea is more common when this is combined with chemotherapy. I would assure adequate hydration and replace electrolytes as appropri...
What adjuvant treatment approach would you choose for a premenopausal woman with lymph node positive poorly differentiated metaplastic breast cancer that is ER low+, PR+, HER2 negative?
Given the tumor is ER low+ (and I'm going to assume not strongly PR+ in this case since that would be highly unusual in the setting of ER low positivity only...but please comment back if I'm wrong!), yes, I would consider this biologically triple-negative disease (and very high risk given metaplasti...
In a patient with ER+/HER2+ breast cancer with significant residual disease post neoadjuvant TCHP, is there a role of using CDK4/6i in the adjuvant setting with T-DM1?
This is an open question. As has been true in oncology for some time, most of the adjuvant therapies we offer have shown benefit first in the metastatic setting, and then are tested in the adjuvant setting. Abemaciclib has been shown to have benefit when combined with herceptin and endocrine therapy...
How do you approach ovarian function suppression in premenopausal women with HR+/HER2-, node negative breast cancer and intermediate OncoType dx scores (11-25) who received chemotherapy?
The SOFT/TEXT data showed that the patients who benefited from ovarian suppression + endocrine therapy were those who were <35 years old or those who had prior chemotherapy (essentially those patients who were deemed to have high risk disease). The TAILORx study demonstrated that patients with recur...
Do you hold endocrine therapy during adjuvant breast radiotherapy?
I start endocrine therapy after RT. For one, I don’t think there is a rush to get endocrine therapy going and would rather focus on the patient being able to tolerate it for the long term. And two, if radiation works best on quickly dividing cells, I don’t want to stunt their proliferation (which we...
Can you use Oncotype for determining adjuvant therapy in a young, premenopausal woman with multifocal HR+ breast cancer s/p mastectomy with 2 positive lymph nodes?
There are no data yet that I am aware of (retrospective or prospective) for the use of Oncotype 21 gene assay to make treatment decisions in premenopausal women with node positive, estrogen receptor positive early stage breast cancer. The prospective RxPONDER trial will hopefully provide data on the...
In a patient with resected ER+ HER2- breast cancer, how do you decide between TC vs ddAC-T for adjuvant chemotherapy?
I seldom (if ever) use the docetaxel/cyclophosphamide regimen. I find it more toxic than DD-AC-T, so I tend to use the latter once I determine that chemotherapy is indicated. Perhaps a more fundamental question for these patients is which needs or is likely to benefit from chemotherapy. If I have an...
Do you use platinum therapy in BRCA1 mutated patients with ER/PR positive disease receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy?
In the absence of any data (of which I am aware) of benefit from adding a platinum analog to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in BRCA1-mutated patients with ER-positive/HER2-negative cancers (other than those with minimal ER expression, whom I treat as I do patients with triple-negative cancers, with the ad...