VIDEO: Addressing unmet needs in metastatic breast cancer

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I think we've, again made huge headway for treatment of metastatic disease. We are seeing multiple new agents actually get approved at a pretty rapid pace in breast cancer, particularly over the last two to three years. And these agents are improving survival outcomes for patients. So I will say while we're doing better and better, I still think there is a huge need to improve because we're still not curing our patients with metastatic disease. These patients live on lifelong sequential systemic therapies and that has a huge toll on quality of life. And obviously their disease is life-limiting. And so we need to improve things because we do see drug resistance developed with sequential treatments and we need to figure out ways to overcome that. And so, you know, I think we're trying to develop better systemic agents to help with this.

I think we're also thinking about whether or not we need multimodality therapy to again, help improve outcomes. There have been some work done on trying to integrate local therapy into the metastatic breast cancer treatment course, but unfortunately, to date, have not really resulted in survival benefit. And so, you know, I still think we have a huge hill to climb to really have a dramatic shift in outcomes for patients. But I will say, having been treating breast cancer for over 15 years, I will say particularly the last two to three years have been the most exciting for me where I've really seen the most headway being made. And so I'm really hopeful that we're going to get there and continue to see improvements in outcome.