Dr. Shao on Prognosis of Patients With HER2+ Breast Cancer

Theresa Shao, MD, assistant professor of hematology-oncology, Icahn School of Medicine, Tisch Cancer Institute, Mount Sinai Health System, discusses the prognosis of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

The last few years have brought an emergence of new targeted therapies for the neoadjuvant and adjuvant settings, significantly changing the outlook for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer. Looking at the APHINITY study or trials with neratinib (Nerlynx), the invasive disease-free survival rates at 3 and 5 years are on the order of 90%, which is amazing, Shao says.

There also recent studies suggesting that patients with HER2-positive breast cancer may be doing better than other subtypes of breast cancer, or at least as well as patients with estrogen receptor—positive or HER2-negative disease. This is completely different than a decade ago, Shao notes, when a diagnosis of HER2-positive disease was seen as an aggressive, poor prognosis for which there were limited treatment options. Now, agents like trastuzumab (Herceptin) and pertuzumab (Perjeta)—and most recently, ado-trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; Kadcyla)—are prolonging survival for these patients and even hinting at curative strategies.