Well the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is here and I’m very excited to be here to learn what’s new and upcoming in the world of research and clinical care. I meant to get this post up before I left, but my lab work this weekend had other ideas. Just a quickie post from the hotel this morning before the sessions start for real this afternoon.
The biggest, most exciting news is that Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) will have its first education session ever at SABCS. It is today at 5:30pm, and is being chaired by MD Anderson’s awesome Dr Wendy Woodward. The other IBC expert speakers are Massimo Cristofanilli and Sofia Merajver.
Looking through the rest of the program briefly, a few themes popped out at me about this meeting. One – this will be a big meeting for TNBC biology. We are no doubt going to hear about new developments in finding new targets, including following up on the relevance of JAK2 mutations (as reported last year), targeting the folate receptor, and cancer stem cell pathways. In addition, we will be hearing more about Celldex’s antibody-drug conjugate, Glembatumumab vedotin(also known as CDX-011) that is being studied in metastatic TNBC, in their new randomized METRIC study. CDX-011 targets TNBCs that overexpress glycoprotein gpNMB, which is involved in aggressiveness of TNBCS (resistance to standard chemotherapy, increased invasion and metastasis.).
Today as expected there is a session on the DNA damage response, another hot area of research in TNBC biology, and we will be also hearing about progress with CDK4/6 inhibitors in ER+ disease, now that there are at least 2 good agents available (Pfizer’s Palbociclib and Novartis’s LEE011).
Other than TNBC biology, looking forward to hearing the updates on the big multi-center adaptively-designed I-SPY2 study. I-SPY2 is a neoadjuvant trial looking at whether adding novel drugs to standard chemotherapy improves outcomes, and hopefully how specific biomarkers correlate or not with responsiveness to these agents. And finally, there is an adoptive T-cell session – an area of intense interest after the recent promising results in other tumor types. Hopefully we can figure out how to make breast cancer cells as susceptible to the immune system as other cancers.
So that’s what’s up folks! More later.
