VIDEO: Keeping patients at the center of care essential in metastatic breast cancer

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I think we are realizing more and more that we really need to keep the patient at the center of a multidisciplinary panel of physicians, nurses, and general providers with different expertise, and so we are realizing this, especially in terms of toxicity management, for instance, because we are in certain settings escalated our treatment in order to improve outcomes, and so for instance, we're seeing that for triple-negative breast cancer, we added immunotherapy to backbone of chemotherapy. We are starting to use combos also in endocrine treatment, signs of the disease. We are realizing that to manage all of these side effects, we definitely need to utilize a multidisciplinary panel that includes cardiologists, pulmonologists, endocrinologists, and beyond this also, to have a team, a nursing team that is able also to capture and help to guide the patients to toward the management, both of the disease and the side effects of the treatments, and so I really think right now, collaborative management is key in order to improve outcomes and to make treatments more tolerable for patients, and beyond this, I conceive collaborations also with the patient. I think the patient is kind of collaborating with the treatment in a sense that it helps to kind of understand whenever there is suspicion for a new side effect. We're seeing this more and more, for instance, with interstitial lung disease, that is side effect observed with several ADCs, and we're seeing that educating the patient to let us know and let the team know whenever there is some slight symptom that may suggest ILD, is really helping to detect these and other side effects early and to treat them more effectively. So, I really think right now, it is established that patients need to be treated collaboratively, both in terms of expanding, let's say the management of the patient to many providers with different expertise, but also to collaborate with the patients in order to identify side effects early, and also to utilize the best treatment strategies at each point that align with the patient values.