Baylor co-hosted breast conference draws large group of researchers
The annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium held last December and co-hosted by Baylor
College of Medicine drew more than 7,000 researchers from across the world.
The conference, co-hosted in collaboration with Baylor, the American Association of Cancer
Research & Research Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio,
brought together researchers from around the world who presented new research all areas of
breast cancer, including major reports on prevention, management and new treatment options.
The symposium wrapped its 36th year and is considered the world's largest conference on breast
cancer.
Baylor faculty members have had a long-standing history with the meeting, dating back to the
very first one in 1978.
Dr. Kent Osborne, director of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center and the NCIdesignated Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center at Baylor and co-director of the symposium, has been
involved since 1978. Osborne was a faculty member at UTHSCA at the time the symposium
started, before moving to Baylor in 1999.
New research, treatment in breast cancer presented
at SABCS
This entry was posted on December 11, 2013
by BCM Office of Communications, in
Cancer and tagged Breast Cancer, Glenna
Picton, Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center,
Research, San Antonio Breast Cancer
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Dr. Kent Osborne
While the San Antonio Breast Cancer
Symposium officially kicked off yesterday,
today was the first day that new scientific and
clinical data was presented.
Experts and research teams from around the
world shared information on treatment options
for screening, prevention and disease management. New treatment options for HER2-positive
breast cancer patients were also presented today.
Baylor College of Medicine’s very own Dr. Kent Osborne, director of the NCI-designated Dan
L. Duncan Cancer Center and Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, and a co-director of the
meeting, moderated one of the day’s most important press briefings.
Osborne addressed a variety of media outlets, providing his expert commentary about new trends
in breast cancer management. He said the trend is “less and less therapy” for certain cancer
types.
In addition to new scientific presentations, College faculty participated in educational forums for
conference attendees.
Dr. Jeff Rosen, distinguished service professor of molecular and cellular biology, moderated a
discussion on therapeutic implications of cancer stem cells, while Dr. Malcolm Brenner,
professor and a member of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, led a discussion on adoptive tcell therapy.
Watch for tomorrow’s recap for new information on the biology of breast cancer, symptom
management, new drug combinations and new options for prevention.
Join the conversation and follow @bcmhouston for updates from San Antonio throughout the
week and follow #sabcs13 for tweets from the conference.
-By Glenna Picton
New options for hard-to-treat breast cancer
highlight SABCS
This entry was posted on December 13, 2013 by BCM Office of Communications, in Cancer and
tagged Breast Cancer, Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center, Dr. Kent Osborne, Lester and Sue Smith
Breast Center, Research, San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Bookmark the permalink.
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Presentations on new breast cancer research concluded today at the San Antonio Breast Cancer
Symposium.
New studies on treatment options for triple negative breast cancer – an aggressive type of breast
cancer with limited treatment options –were the highlight of studies released Friday.
Learn more from the day’s headlines:
2 Pre-Surgery Drug Treatments Show Promise Against Aggressive Breast Cancer
AbbVie drug shows promise against difficult type of breast cancer
In addition to new research, educational forums continued during the afternoon.
Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Xiang Zhang, assistant professor in the Lester and Sue Smith
Breast Center, and Dr. Kent Osborne, SABCS co-director and director of the NCI-designated
Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center and Sue Smith Breast Center, participated in talks on breast
cancer metastasis and HER2-positive breast cancer.
Finally, a poster presentation from Baylor researchers revealing new information on a marker in
breast cancer tissues and tumor-initiating cells was featured in the evening poster sessions.
Tomorrow the conference will officially end with a year-in-review talk by Osborne.
2 Pre-Surgery Drug Treatments Show Promise Against Aggressive Breast
Cancer
In studies, combo regimens produced better results for
'triple-negative' disease
By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, Dec. 13, 2013 (HealthDay News) -- Women fighting an aggressive form of breast
cancer may benefit from adding certain drugs to their chemotherapy regimen, and taking them
prior to surgery, new research finds.
This pre-surgical drug therapy boosts the likelihood that no cancer cells will be found in breast
tissue removed during either mastectomy or lumpectomy, according to two new studies.
The approach, called "neoadjuvant" chemotherapy, is being given to an increasing number of
women with what's known as triple-negative breast cancer. Currently, the approach results in no
identifiable cancer cells at mastectomy or lumpectomy in about-one third of patients, experts
estimate. In such cases, the risk of a tumor recurrence becomes lower.
"Chemotherapy [before surgery] does work in triple-negative breast cancer. What we want to do
is make it work better," said study researcher Dr. Hope Rugo.
Rugo is director of breast oncology and clinical trials education at the Helen Diller Family
Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco.
Triple-negative cancers have cells that lack receptors for the hormones estrogen and
progesterone. In addition, they don't have an excess of the protein known as HER2 on the cell
surfaces. So, treatments that work on the receptors and drugs that target HER2 don't work in
these cancers.
In two new studies, researchers got better results by adding drugs to the standard chemo regimen
prior to surgery. However, both studies are phase 2 trials, so more research is needed.
Both studies are due to be presented Friday at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer
Symposium.
Rugo compared standard neoadjuvant therapy -- paclitaxel (Taxol, others), doxorubicin
(Adriamycin) and cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan, others) -- to standard therapy plus the drugs
veliparib (investigational) and carboplatin (Paraplatin).
Of the 38 women with triple-negative cancer in the study, 52 percent of those getting the extra
drugs with the standard approach had no cancer cells identified at surgery, compared with 26
percent of those on the standard therapy.
In a second study, Dr. William Sikov, at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and
colleagues compared the standard chemotherapy using anthracycline- and taxane-based drugs
with three other regimens. These added carboplatin, bevacizumab (Avastin) or both to the
standard regimen.
The researchers randomly assigned 443 patients with triple-negative breast cancer to one of the
four groups. Those in the combination groups were more likely to have no breast cancer cells
found at surgery than those in the standard groups. While 42 percent of those in the standard
group had no breast cancer cells identified at surgery, 50 percent to 67 percent of those in the
combination groups did not.
Genentech, which makes Avastin, funded Sikov's study. Other supporters included the U.S.
National Institutes of Health and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
The research presented by Rugo is funded by a variety of sources, included unrestricted funding
from several pharmaceutical companies.
"Every time we have studies like this, it tells us we are on to something," said Dr. Joanne
Mortimer, director of women's cancer programs at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer
Center, in Duarte, Calif. She reviewed the findings. While the approaches warrant further
investigation, she cautions that ''both these studies have very small numbers."
Complicating the issue, she said, is that "triple-negative is not a single disease." There are several
subtypes, and patients respond differently to treatments. "This [research] is very interesting, but
until we know which actual specific patient's tumors are going to benefit, it's hard to apply this to
the population," Mortimer said.
Studies presented at medical conferences are considered preliminary since they have not yet had
the independent scrutiny required for publication in most medical journals.
AbbVie drug shows promise against difficult type of breast cancer
Friday, December 13, 2013 7:33 a.m. CST
A patient receives chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer at the Antoine-Lacassagne Cancer Center
in Nice July 26, 2012. REUTERS/Eric Gail
By Bill Berkrot
(Reuters) - Women with an especially deadly type of breast cancer who received a treatment
regimen containing an experimental AbbVie Inc drug prior to surgery are likely to have a
significantly better response than those who get a standard chemotherapy regimen, according to
data from a clinical trial.
Patients with so-called triple negative breast cancer, who tend to be younger and have a very
poor prognosis, appeared to have double the response rate to the regimen containing AbbVie's
veliparib in a new type of study that exploits advances in molecular understanding of the disease,
researchers found.
The trial dubbed I-SPY 2 is another step toward developing more personalized treatments. Its
design allows researchers to continuously monitor how patients respond as the trial progresses
and move patients into arms of the study testing drugs from which they are more likely to gain
benefit.
This type of trial should help companies select the right group of patients to enroll into larger,
more traditional late stage clinical trials, potentially cutting the cost of bringing new medicines to
market.
Drugmakers are under increasing pressure to cut the cost of new medicines that put a huge
burden on healthcare systems. One way to do that would be through more efficient, alternative
testing methods that lead to fewer trial failures.
"It's a very nimble trial design that allows you to enroll a fairly small number of patients and
come to a fairly high certainty of success (in later larger trials) in a specific subset of patients,"
explained Dr. Hope Rugo, who presented the data at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium
on Friday.
If a drug combination starts to look like it is working better on patients with one type of breast
cancer, the trial design allows for more patients with that type of cancer to move into that arm of
the study, said Rugo, director of breast oncology and clinical trials education at the UCSF Helen
Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Francisco.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which signed off on the trial design, has said that if a
study drug helps cure significantly more cancers, it could be given a provisional type of
accelerated approval.
FASTER DEVELOPMENT, REDUCED COST
"If we can get a better idea of who benefits early, it's going to be an enormous change in the way
we test new agents, and not just for breast cancer but for other malignancies as well," Rugo said.
"You could avoid doing a 3,500 patient trial in a group of patients who you thought might
benefit but don't," she said. "We'll be able to get the drugs to the patients who need them much
more quickly and at reduced cost."
The I-SPY program is testing a variety of experimental medicines from several drugmakers in
the neoadjuvant, or pre-surgery, setting in high-risk patients. Rugo was presenting the portion of
the trial that involved the AbbVie drug.
In that arm of the study involving 71 high risk patients, the researchers were testing to see
whether the treatment, given before surgery, could eliminate any evidence of invasive cancer in
breast tissue and lymph nodes removed during subsequent surgery - a measurement known as
pathologic complete response (PCR).
They found an estimated PCR in 52 percent of women who were treated with AbbVie's veliparib
plus the chemotherapies carboplatin and paclitaxel. That compared with a 26 percent PCR rate in
those who just got standard paclitaxel. Both groups also received anthracycline-based
chemotherapy prior to surgery.
"If we can increase the number of patients who have no invasive cancer, we expect that this will
translate into better survival," Rugo said.
Most breast cancer tumors are estrogen-receptor positive, fueled by the hormone estrogen. About
20 percent are HER2-positive, meaning a protein called HER2 is prevalent. A third type is driven
by the hormone progesterone. All of these have potentially effective treatment options even after
recurrence.
Triple-negative tumors - about 15 percent of breast cancers - lack estrogen, progesterone or
HER2 receptors needed for most drugs to work. If the tumor does not respond to chemotherapy,
there are currently no alternatives and the typical survival rate after recurrence is less than two
years.
More women treated with veliparib and carboplatin dropped out of the study due to side effects,
whereas discontinuations in the control arm were primarily due to disease progression.
Rugo said she looked forward to further study of the AbbVie drug, noting that the trial design did
not separate which effects were due to veliparib and which to carboplatin.
However, she said, the doubling of response rates was "very encouraging to us and suggests that
veliparib is playing an important role in the enhanced response that we're seeing."
(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)