Dr. Tripathy Reviews Targeted Therapies in Breast Cancer

Debu Tripathy, MD, co-leader, Women's Cancer Program, University of Southern California Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses the targeted therapies that are currently available for the treatment of patients with breast cancer.

Currently, the HER2-targeted agent trastuzumab is the standard of care for patients with early-stage and metastatic, HER2-positive breast cancer. Newer drugs, Tripathy says, are not perfect but they certainly have a clinical impact. In the first-line setting, the addition of pertuzumab to trastuzumab has shown improvement to disease-free survival and overall survival.

T-DM1, an immunoconjugate targeted at HER2, was recently approved for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. This approval was based off an improvement in survival over lapatinib and capecitabine, which was the previous standard of care in the second-line setting for HER2-positive disease.

These advances are important because they extend survival with a minimal impact on toxicity and represent new standard of care, Tripathy notes. However, these agents do have limitations as patients are not cured and not all respond.