Breast Cancer

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved two new indications for the osteoporosis drug denosumab, as a treatment for bone loss in men receiving androgen deprivation therapy for nonmetastatic prostate cancer and in women receiving adjuvant aromatase inhibitor therapy for breast cancer.

In spite of screening recommendations that now begin only at 50 years of age, breast cancer is often diagnosed in women under the age of 40, and there are specific challenges to management of the disease in this younger population.

Triple-negative breast cancers represent a challenge for patients and clinicians, with poorer prognosis and fewer treatment options than other breast cancer subtypes. Recently, though, there have been suggestions that targeting pathways that repair DNA within tumor cells could provide benefit beyond the currently available treatments.

The safety and efficacy of breast-conserving therapy (BCT) for women with early-stage breast cancer are well established. BCT entails wide excision of the tumor and appropriate nodal evaluation, followed by radiation therapy to the breast.

Breast-conserving therapy (BCT), which includes wide local excision of the tumor followed by irradiation, has become a standard treatment option for women with early-stage invasive breast cancer.

The article by Revesz and Khan is an excellent summary of the state of our knowledge of margin width in relation to breast cancer recurrence.

Treatments vary widely for metastatic breast cancer patients, though an analysis suggests that costs per patient are relatively similar across a number of different treatments.

The results of a study that tracked BRCA mutation carriers suggest that women who inherit BRCA gene mutations develop cancer at a younger age than women in the previous generation. The study is published on-line today in the journal Cancer.

Though there is still disagreement, a new study presented at the ASCO Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco suggests that annual mammography and palpation of breast masses remain critical tools in early breast cancer diagnosis.

A new study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco shows that there is no survival difference between having a mastectomy or breast conservation therapy in women under the age of 40.

Researchers have identified that “maintenance of global heterochromatin integrity” is a novel function of BRCA1 gene, and propose that this DNA-silencing function is linked to the role of BRCA1 as a tumor suppressor, in an article published in Nature.

Cancer Network speaks with Dr. Joseph Sparano, Professor of Medicine and Women’s Health at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine and Associate Chairman of the Department of Oncology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, about the session he will chair at the ASCO Breast Symposium on September 8-10, in San Francisco.

Researchers at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver and colleagues have just published the results of a phase II study showing that olaparib (AZD2281), an oral PARP inhibitor, may be effective in treating non-BRCA-related ovarian cancer patients.

A study published online in the American Cancer Society journal Cancer suggests that when women stop going to their doctors for hormone therapy prescriptions, the physicians do not remind them to get a mammogram.

Results of a Phase I study of the novel Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor veliparib (ABT-888) in solid tumors and lymphoma have just been published in Cancer Research (doi:10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-11-1227).

Improved screening practices have lead to a dramatic increase in the diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) over the past 40 years.

Few areas in breast disease elicit as much controversy as the management of DCIS. The review by Sanders and Simpson, “Can We Know What to Do When DCIS Is Diagnosed?”

It is ironic that while huge strides have been made in the treatment of invasive breast carcinoma, resulting in breast conservation for many women, the most appropriate treatment of noninvasive breast carcinoma remains a topic of hot debate.

Since 1990, death rates from breast cancer have decreased, mainly in women younger than 50 years of age (3.3% per year) vs women aged 50 years or older (2% per year), reflecting the benefit of widespread use of systemic treatment added to early detection.[1]

Dapagliflozin, the experimental diabetes medication being developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca was found to raise the risk of both bladder and breast cancers. The data were presented at the American Diabetes Association Meeting in San Diego, Calif. at the end of June.

Personalized cancer care is generally thought of as using molecular information from tumors in order to identify which therapeutic agents will be most effective in a given patient.

The Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group overviews published in 2005 confirm that local control in breast cancer matters, and they highlight that achieving local control in the modern era is not improved simply by more extensive surgery but instead by the combination of surgery, systemic and hormonal chemotherapies, and radiation therapy.[1,2]

Researchers at the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) in London, driven by the unmet need of personalized cancer treatments for a greater subset of tumors have identified genes in breast tumor cells that sustain and grow the tumors that are potential targets for drug development.

Scientists at the NCI have designed a novel protein, HER2-Affitoxin, aimed to treat HER2-positive breast cancer. In vitro experiments and mouse breast cancer models show that the agent is highly effective in eradication of HER2-over expressing cancer cell as well as tumors in mice.

Many doctors do not properly adhere to current guidelines for offering breast and ovarian cancer counseling and testing services to their female patients, according to a new study from the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control at the CDC.

Results from a prospective study of 1023 newly-diagnosed HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients show that treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin) and chemotherapy independently resulted in statistically significant improvement in median overall survival from the time central nervous system (CNS) metastases were diagnosed.

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Researchers at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine have parsed the large and heterogeneous triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) category of patients into 6 molecularly distinct subgroups. This may be an important step towards delineating these patients as specific genetic subtypes to channel them to appropriate targeted therapy trials.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) continues to carry a poor prognosis. However, novel prognostic and potentially predictive biomarkers may soon improve that bleak outlook, according to a series of studies presented on Saturday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Live coverage of the ASCO session on PARP inhibitors and DNA repair, with speakers Michael Kastan, Judy Garber, and Elisabeth Plummer.