2019 ASCO Annual Meeting Research Round Up: Breast Cancer, Head and Neck Cancer, and Cancer-Related Nausea and Vomiting

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The 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, held May 31 to June 4, brought together physicians, researchers, patient advocates, and other health care professionals from around the world to present and discuss the latest research in cancer treatment and patient care. In the annual Research Round Up podcast series, Cancer.Net Associate Editors share their thoughts on the most exciting scientific research to come out of this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting and what it means for patients.

First, Dr. Lynn Henry will discuss 3 studies that explored new treatment options for women with breast cancer, including a study on immunotherapy for triple-negative breast cancer and 2 studies on treatment for hormone receptor positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. She also discusses research on the effects of a low-fat diet in women diagnosed with breast cancer, and a study on whether pregnancy after breast cancer increased the risk of recurrence.

Dr. Henry is an Associate Professor and Interim Division Chief of Oncology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Utah and Director of Breast Medical Oncology at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. She is also the Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Breast Cancer.

Dr. Henry: Hi. My name is Dr. Lynn Henry. I'm a medical oncologist who specializes in treating breast cancer at the University of Utah. Today, I'm going to discuss research on breast cancer that was presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago. In particular, I'm going to focus on the results of some clinical trials that directly impact how oncologists treat patients with breast cancer. First, I'm going to give just a very brief overview of the types of breast cancer and then talk about some research that was presented on triple-negative and hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. Then I'm going to briefly review findings related to diet and breast cancer as well as pregnancy after breast cancer in women with BRCA mutations.

As a quick reminder, there are multiple kinds of breast cancer. Some breast cancers are called hormone-receptor positive or estrogen-receptor positive, and those are stimulated to grow by estrogen. We treat those cancers with anti-estrogen treatments or anti-hormone treatments to block estrogen or lower the estrogen level in the body. Other breast cancers are called HER2-positive. These are often more aggressive cancers. But because they have extra copies of HER2, they often respond to treatments that block HER2. And finally, there are breast cancers that don't have hormone receptors or HER2, and these are called triple-negative breast cancer.

So first, I'm going to focus on this type, triple-negative breast cancer. Until recently, most of the time, we treated triple-negative breast cancer with chemotherapy because we hadn't found other drugs that worked very well. There's a new type of drug, however, called immunotherapy that tries to use a patient's immune system to help fight the breast cancer. Early in 2019, the FDA approved a new treatment for triple-negative breast cancer that is a combination of a chemotherapy called Abraxane and a new immune drug called atezolizumab or Tecentriq. The combination increased the length of time until cancer progressed or grew. Overall, the treatment was fairly well tolerated. But we did learn that in order for the treatment to work, the cells surrounding the cancer have to have at least a small amount of a very specific protein called PD-L1.

So at this recent ASCO meeting, we heard an update about this treatment. In the trial, the patients whose cancers had the PD-L1 protein and who got the combination treatment lived 7 months longer than those who got just the chemotherapy, which was an increase from 18 months to just over 2 years. This is an important first step towards finding a better treatment for this difficult type of triple-negative breast cancer. And this treatment is currently available to patients. Additional clinical trials are going on now to try to find even better combinations of chemotherapy and immune therapies to treat this type of cancer.

So next, I'm going to talk about hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. There were two trials of...