VIDEO: Understanding the treatment of different breast cancer subsets

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

First of all, I think all clinicians should understand the general concepts of how we treat the different subsets and what biological therapies are available to use the best judgment. It's one thing to know, well, this drug is approved and that drugs approved, but to know what sequence to use it in and what are the toxicities and how to present to a patient the relative risks and benefits and then how to deduce what prior therapy may, how that may affect one's choices. A lot of that is not just, you know written in the FDA approval packet. So I think that staying up to date with the drug approvals but also understanding a little bit deeper what the trials were showing us, what different people's experience are showing us. I have learned a lot from talking to my colleagues that are working in the community and seeing more patients than I do, and hearing their feedback to some of the side effects they're seeing, some of the questions that patients ask. The questions your patients ask actually are a treasure trove, because even though they may take your more of your time in the office when you're explaining things to them, the very nature of their questions is instructive to you. You know, what they want to hear so you can prepare for the next patient. So, you know, be mindful of that that patients need to understand the basis of these drugs as well. And their capacity to understand this is much more than you would think. As long as you explain the biology, it makes sense to them, they understand not only the power and potential of these drugs, but also the limitations and the side effects of these drugs and get a more realistic sense as to how they might behave. So I think patient communication and staying up with medical knowledge is critical.

The other area is of course to obtain sequencing of patients who may be candidates for clinical trials and explain to them that some of the gene sequencing results may affect places for approved drugs, but some of them may not. And they may be question marks as to whether a drug that's approved for another cancer or a completely experimental drug might work in their situation because of a defined reason, because of a specific mutation. So I think that obtaining genomics is important. I'll admit it sometimes a low yield exercise, a lot of patients end up having no druggable mutations but the more we do this and the more it adds to our knowledge and the more it can help enroll patients to clinical trials that will really accelerate our progress in this area. So I would encourage that that be explained to patients and that we do that. And then, you know, obviously if they do qualify for a trial, facilitate their ability to enroll in a trial either reach out to a center that has these trials or consider opening trials at your own centers. Now that they're becoming more mainstream and more and more practices now are trying to get clinical trials up and running. So I think we're all in this together, the community of physicians and patients and pharmacists and nurses and everybody that works here really needs to be tuned into where the park is going and how we can best move things forward collaboratively.