Dr Hope Rugo: Advances in HER2-Positive Breast Cancer

Hope Rugo, MD, director of the breast oncology clinical trials program at the University of California at San Francisco, discusses advances in the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer.

Transcript:

Is there anything you’re working on or excited about in HER2-positive breast cancer that you’d like to share?

We're working on a number of different things. One is trying to move neratinib earlier in the adjuvant course and seeing if we can manage the diarrhea with a novel agent. So that’s one trial my colleague Joe Chen is working on.

In terms of the metastatic setting, there are a number of novel agents, oral TKIs [tyrosine-kinase inhibitors], and then an antibody—drug conjugate from Daiichi which has shown responses in patients who had highly resistant disease, at least as reported to trastuzumab. That’s going into a phase 3 trial this year. Then there’s a novel antibody that binds to the receptors a bit differently called margetuximab that’s in a phase 3 trial called the SOPHIA trial. That drug also showed responses in phase 1 studies in patients who had disease resistant to trastuzumab.

So, I think there’s a number of different agents out there which seem as though they have potential for the future.