VIDEO: Coming years may see new approvals in metastatic breast cancer

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I'm a little biased because I work in the ADC field, and what I like of ADC is that they are modular compounds. They're made of an antibody, a linker, and a payload and you can change just one of these pieces and make a completely different ADC, completely different compound. And so, there's so many, there's actually more than, I believe, 50 or 60 ADCs currently in the pipeline that may improve outcomes for patients with breast cancer, including several that are in phase three testing, and at least one datopotamab deruxtecan [AstraZeneca] that has shown positive data, positive results already in a phase three trial. So, I think ADCs are going to further reshape the way we treat metastatic breast cancer. And also, several trials are ongoing in the curative setting in early breast cancer. So, we going to see more and more within this field. And then I mentioned oral SERDs, I think that there are, besides elacestrant [Orserdu; Menarini Group] that was approved, so many different oral thirds and also novel endocrine therapies like PROTACs. So, the graders of this receptor that utilize ubiquitination or also other types of endocrine treatments are in the pipeline, have shown promising phase one data, and we hope with these agents to both improve outcomes in the metastatic setting, but also to be able to prevent more recurrences and improve outcomes in the early-stage setting. And finally, I think immunotherapy is more and more coming of age. And so right now we are used to utilizing immunotherapy for treating metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, and more recently also early triple-negative breast cancer. But some very interesting data has been recently shown with both neoadjuvant pembrolizumab (Keytruda; Merck] or nivolumab [Opdivo; Bristol Myers Squibb] added to chemotherapy for early stage or more receptor positive breast cancer. It is actually the most common type of breast cancer and so if the positive PR data, the improved positive PR data will also reflect in improved survival, I think neoadjuvant immunotherapy will become an effective strategy, not only for triple-negative breast cancer, but also for the far more common or more such positive breast cancer. So, I think in every field, ADCs, endocrine treatment, immunotherapy, things are moving very fast and at certain point we'll need to put it all together, but I think it's good news. I really think in the next few years we'll see more and more new approvals in all of these settings.