Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Cancer Immunotherapy

Posts from the ‘breast’ category

Challenges and Opportunities in Inflammatory Breast Cancer

At the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS16), I had the great pleasure to talk with a leading inflammatory breast cancer expert and translational researcher, Naoto T. Ueno MD PhD.

Dr Naoto Ueno at SABCS16

Dr Ueno is Executive Director of the Morgan Welch Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Program and Clinic at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

He’s active on Twitter where, as @teamoncology, he shares information on the latest developments in breast cancer, often writing in Japanese for his followers.

A cancer survivor himself, he also brings an empathy to patient care through his own treatment experience.

Anyone who follows him on Twitter, will also know he is a “foodie.”  Prior to our chat, I joked he should write the definitive guide to San Antonio restaurants for attendees… he definitely ate better than I did at the meeting!

MD Anderson also has an IBC conference coming up next month for those interested in the area:

What caught my attention at SABCS16 were posters from MD Anderson researchers that offered insight into the challenges and opportunities in targeting this rare form of breast cancer, something we don’t hear a lot about.

Subscribers can login to read the interview Dr Ueno kindly gave BSB. This is the fourth in our series of expert interviews from San Antonio.

If you have a keen interest in IBC, do follow @teamoncology – if you don’t already!

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Advances in Breast Cancer Immunotherapy

At the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (#SABCS16) one of the mini-symposia that caught my attention was on “Harnessing the Immune System in Breast Cancer.”

A line-up of top researchers and clinicians shared the latest on breast cancer immunotherapy:

  • Laurence Zitvogel MD PhD (Gustave Roussy), “From Breast Cancer Surveillance to Immunotherapy”
  • Leisha Emens MD PhD (Johns Hopkins), “Breast Cancer Immunotherapy: Building on Clinical Success”
  • Andy Minn MD PhD (Univ of Pennsylvania): “Identification of Resistance Mechanisms to Checkpoint Blockade for Cancer”
Dr Laurence Zitvogel SABCS16

Dr Laurence Zitvogel at SABCS16

Readers of the blog will recall we last spoke with Dr Emens at the AACR 2015 annual meeting (is it really that long ago?!) where she presented the first data for the PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab in Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC). See post: “Checkpoint data rocks AACR 2015.”

What’s new in breast cancer immunotherapy and how have things advanced since then?

At SABCS16, we heard about a novel immunotherapy strategy targeting adenosine in breast cancer, and the trial with an adenonsine antagonist, CPI-444 (Corvus Pharmaceuticals, NASDAQ: CRVS) that’s now underway.

Last September, Corvus senior scientist Stephen Willingham, PhD and Chief Business Officer, Jason Coloma, PhD spoke to BSB about the data they were presenting at the 2016 CRI-CIMT-EATI-AACR Cancer Immunotherapy Conference in New York. See post: “Corvus moves fast to target the tumor microenvironment and improve checkpoint responses.”

Corvus had a presentation at the 2017 JP Morgan Healthcare conference (#JPM17) yesterday, and we’ve included some additional commentary on that in this post.

After the SABCS16 cancer immunotherapy mini-symposium, Dr Leisha Emens, Associate Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, kindly spoke to BSB.

Dr Leisha Emens SABCS16

Dr Leisha Emens at SABCS16

She’s one of the rock stars of breast cancer immunotherapy, and it was truly a pleasure to catch up with her again in San Antonio.

This is the second in our series of expert interviews from #SABCS16. In case you missed the prior posts and want to bookmark for the upcoming ones, you will find them on the conference page (Link).

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Emerging Trends from SABCS16 in San Antonio

Like migrating birds, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) has many regular attendees who return each year to enjoy the location and opportunity to hear about latest advances in breast cancer. One leading academic clinician told me she’d been to every meeting for the past 20 years.

The Alamo, San Antonio TX

The Alamo

SABCS offers a unique mix of academic and community doctors, translational researchers, basic scientists and patient advocates. The only downside is that at times the meeting (to an outsider) does feel like a club or family with it’s own idiosyncrasies.

This year, a leading breast cancer oncologist characterized the meeting to me as a “negative one,” meaning several clinical trials were presented that reported essentially negative results.

Although these are an important part of science, and it was good to see them presented, like most of the media, even medical oncologists want to see the “positive” news and that’s understandable. There was no practice changing phase 3 data as in previous years. The trial we most anticipated being at SABCS was delayed due to slow events and that’s a good sign as it most likely means women are living longer…

As readers of the blog will know, we’ve yet to find a medical/scientific meeting that did not offer up pearls, and #SABCS16 was no different in this regard.

Whether you have to spend time in the poster halls or go to obscure sessions, they are there to be found somewhere.

I came away from #SABCS16 with fresh insights into new targets, biomarkers, and also how the world of cancer immunotherapy will interface with genomics. It is these advances in basic and translational science that drive future clinical research.

Experts I spoke to at San Antonio were generous with their time and insights and we’ll be rolling out a series of thought leader interviews in Q1, 2017.

In this post, I wanted to set the scene with what I thought were 3 trends emerging from SABCS16. This is of course, an entirely subjective choice and if you went to the meeting, and/or are an expert in the area, your list would most likely be different.

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If you’d like to buy a quarterly subscription as a gift for someone, do contact us and we can arrange for it to be set up to run from the New Year in the recipient’s name.

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Making breast cancer cells become normal again

The first day of the 2016 EORTC-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets meeting brought us chilly weather and a frozen lake outside the conference centre in Munich.  Brrrr!

gluhwein-munchenIt also heralded a great lineup of cancer researchers largely characterised by unconventional thinking. This, of course, is a good thing because it is only by dismissing dogma that a field can move forward unconstrained.

There were several talks that I will come back to in a separate post, but here I wanted to focus on one particularly good talk on breast cancer, something we haven’t covered in a while.

A decade or two ago, breast cancer made a lot of progress – we saw the emergence of gene expression profiling, the identification of different histology types, treatments for hormonal sensitivity or HER2-positivity and then… nothing.  Meanwhile, the issue of drug resistance plagued researchers – why don’t all women respond and why do they become resistant?

In the meantime, we’ve seen a wealth of progress in melanoma, lung, kidney and bladder cancers, enormous strides in hematologic malignancies and many other areas.  Breast cancer, the early star, seems to have faded and we haven’t had much to be cheerful about aside from a few isolated cases.

The good news is that things are a-changin’ though and research is looking more promising as we learn from lessons in basic and translational research and how they can be applied to new therapeutics and drug resistance.

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ESMO16 Preview 7 Key Trials in Breast Cancer

There was a time when it seemed that all the good news emerging in cancer research was on breast cancer, that is clearly no longer true as other tumour types have seen some leaps and bounds with different modalities, including areas previously thought to be a graveyard for big Pharma, such as metastatic melanoma, for example.

new-dawn-houses-of-parliament

New Dawn at the Houses of Parliament

That said, after the excellent developments in hormone-sensitive disease and the identification of the HER2 oncogene, we now have CDK4/6 as a validated target in metastatic breast cancer.

Pfizer’s palbociclib (Ibrance) lead the way, with two approvals in previously untreated and relapsed ER+ HER2- advanced breast cancer. Two other companies in this field are Novartis with ribociclib and Lilly with abemaciclib. Data is being presented on all three therapies at ESMO this year.

In addition, there are some other abstracts of note that are well worth discussing.

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Promising new agents in development for breast cancer

We’ve had a couple of requests come in for a revival of the old conference series… ‘Gems from the poster halls’ because quite a few folks are interested in the up and coming data from small to medium biotechs.

SABCS San Antonio CrowdA bunch of my Post Doc chums in this field were at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) meeting and gleefully highlighted mobbed posters or areas where they thought the data looked potentially interesting.

From these, we selected a few for review in today’s look at the nuggets that can be gleaned from cool and intriguing trials or preclinical research that may influence future trials.

Companies covered in this article include Seattle Genetics, Jounce, Immunomedics, Syndax and MedImmune.

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Checkpoint therapy update in metastatic breast cancer

Today the immunotherapy and related data flooding out of the annual meeting of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) is pretty exciting!

Data was presented on a number of drugs including pembrolizumab, avelumab and atezolizumab, which put together with some recent publications, highlights some potentially exciting opportunities in this fast moving space.

Here, we explore the potential for checkpoint therapy combinations in TNBC, HER2 and even the ER+ subsets.  There’s a lot of new findings to take in and contemplate here.

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SABCS Update on Triple Negative Breast Cancer

A lot has happened this month with San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) and other data emerging that it could be subtitled:

A brief tale of two breast cancer drugs

SABCS San Antonio CrowdAt SABCS a couple of things looked pretty intriguing indeed. One we will cover in the New Year, along with an in-depth expert interview on the topic, while the other is the main focus of today’s note.

In the last post of 2014, it’s time to address some pertinent questions on triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) from subscribers – there is good news to report here, unlike the surprising MARIANNE results for Kadcyla and Perjeta in frontline HER2+ disease that were announced early this morning.

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A big thank you to all who have supported Biotech Strategy Blog Conference Coverage this past year. Wishing you good health, happiness and prosperity in 2015. See you on the other side!

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Do Checkpoint Inhibitors work in Triple Negative Breast Cancer?

SABCS BannerSan Antonio – The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (Twitter #SABCS14) is underway, and one of the key questions everyone is asking is do checkpoint inhibitors work in Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC)?

TNBC is defined as the absence of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and HER2 protein expression. This means that treatments aimed at these targets such as aromatase inhibitors and Herceptin are unlikely to work in TNBC.

TNBC represents approximately 15% of breast cancer patients in the U.S, and to put this number into perspective, around 200,000 women have the disease, with 40,000 deaths each year. Globally, there are an estimated 1 million cases of breast cancer, of which 170,000 are triple-negative (ER-/PR-/HER2-).

The only currently available treatment for TNBC is chemotherapy, but sadly patients often do not live long, and rapidly progress. Progression-free survival (PFS) is estimated to be around 4 months in TNBC. This means there is a real unmet medical need for effective new treatments.

Checkpoint inhibition of the programmed-death 1 receptor (PD-1) such as pembrolizumab (Merck) and the ligand (PD-L1) e.g. MPDL3280A (Genentech/Roche) can increase the effectiveness of a body’s T cells to fight cancer. Are checkpoint inhibitors the future in TNBC and will they offer hope to patients?

Some early preliminary clinical data is being presented this week at SABCS. Subscribers can login below or you can purchase access to read more about what this data signals about the potential of checkpoint inhibition in TNBC.

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ESMO 2014 Preview on Breast Cancer

This last week saw the ASCO Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco, although very little caught my attention from a drug development point of view. Much of the attention seemed to be focused on surgery, genetic counselling and screening.

With the 2014 European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) conference in Madrid coming up fast in only 2 weeks time, it seems a good point to take a look at what’s on the slate there, since there are some important clinical trials being presented there with new data that we can expect to hear a lot more about.

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Companies mentioned: Roche/Genentech, GSK, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Medivation, Astellas
Drugs mentioned: Pertuzumab, trastuzumab, lapatinib, PI3K inhibitors, olaparib, enzalutamide

There are a couple of important breast cancer trials with data being presented for the first time at Madrid.

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