Biotech Strategy Blog

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

Posts tagged ‘Breast Cancer’

Targeting immunosuppression and other stories – are we ready for prime time yet?

View from Stars and Stripes life guard hut on Miami Beach

Our latest article is part Journal Club entry for August, part look back at some data from AACR and ASCO plus a part look at a relatively new target from an obscure biotech that caught my attention recently.

To do this, we pose three critical questions and attempt to answer them.

The targets and markers chosen for review here may well surprise a few people.

If we want to understand how to help more people respond to cancer immunotherapy then we need o understand the underlying biology and the tumour microenvironment in greater depth than we currently do.

Gradually, we are getting more clarity on a few areas as new data is being published…

To learn more from our latest review of data as well as companies and targets to get a heads up on our oncology insights, subscribers can log-in or you can click to gain access to BSB Premium Content.

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Picking PARP inhibitors apart

Picking a PARPi – what can the biology tell us?

One of the really interesting questions I recently received from a BSB subscriber related to PARP inhibitors – they asked whether the therapies are all the same and can be considered interchangeable as a class?

Around the same time, another reader wrote in asking if there was any new information on what’s happening with PARPi combinations in breast or ovarian cancers?

This got me thinking as there has actually been some useful preclinical and clinical studies reported on both fronts that at least begin to open our eyes to new information based on research that has been reported in several places.

Thus I thought it would be useful to summarise the data and take a look at what we learned in the process.

Fair warning – some of the findings turned out to be a little bit more surprising than you might normally expect to see…

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SABCS17 Update on CDK4/6 Inhibitors

It’s one of those truly crazy busy times of the year with no less than three cancer conferences going on this week alone in different cities and time zones. I’ve also been busy scheduling and conducting phone interviews for these events.  More than once have I dialled the wrong number or access code or got briefly confused by time zone changes (CT and CEST?!) and misread the interview at the wrong time… and was that 4.30pm ET or CT?

River Walk, San Antonio, Texas

One of those… If it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium moments to be sure.

Thankfully, everyone has been very thoughtful and helpful and I haven’t managed to get the expert names incorrect (yet)!

Today, I want to take a break from the ASH17 coverage and switch horses from hematologic malignancies to breast cancer and from Atlanta to San Antonio, as there is some important new data emerging from the Lone Star state.

In particular, one of the top posts of 2016 on BSB was on CDK4/6 inhibitors so it’s time for an update on this and some other key studies!

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August 2017 BSB Journal Club on Breast Cancer

Recently there has been a glut of encouraging new research published on the topic of breast cancer that is well worth perusing as a group, since new combination studies may emerge from these kind of data.

In this month’s Journal Club edition, we explore five such articles plus some related research in support of the main themes.

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EACR Cancer Genomics Day 2

Churchill College, Cambridge:  Yesterday, the main focus at the EACR Cancer Genomics conference was on immunology-related topics as they pertain to genomics.

A rainy day in the Fens for #CG17

Unfortunately, however, the Great British summer ended as almost as soon as it started – I can confirm that it started on a Wednesday this year and fizzled out by the following Tuesday!

Consider that on the first two days of the conference it was gloriously sunny and those wooden benches were full of scientists sitting outside eagerly discussing their research or various collaborations afoot.

A mere 24 hours later, the heavens opened and steadfastly drizzled all day long, much to the chagrin of the attendees.

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New IO developments in breast cancer

#ASCO17 Poster Hall aka rugby scrum

There were a lot of gems in the poster halls at ASCO this year, a fact that is partly a reflection of the wealth of new data with various IO combos and also the early cutoff date.

Now I jested before the meeting that these sessions were akin to a rugby scrum and lo and behold (see photo right) they were even more jam packed than usual!

If you wanted to best the eager and energetic Wall St analysts then remembering your ruck and maul skills were not a bad thing to have in muscle memory… It was not something I attempted in the Go-Cart this year for fear of bowling people over in the stampede to nab the QR codes 🙂

Much of the previous readouts have been with monotherapy in immunogenic tumours such as melanoma, lung, bladder, gastric, renal cell carcinoma etc. Objective response rates in metastatic triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) have generally been under 20%, however.

Lately, the focus has turned to the deepening of responses in these tumours with various combination approaches and also moving earlier in the disease setting, where immunotherapies might be expected to be more effective with a lower tumour burden.

While in Chicago, we spoke to a breast cancer specialist about where IO combos are going and his thoughts on future opportunities in our third post in a series on various aspects of new developments in breast cancer.

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AACR 2017 Preview 7

The White House in spring, Washington DC

With spring in the air and the clock rapidly running down on the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Washington DC in just two weeks time, it’s time to take a look at the seventh topic in our Preview series.

What’s hot on deck to day?

With increasing competition in the metastatic breast cancer space, particularly in HR+ HER2- disease, it’s time to explore key issues around CDK4/6 inhibitors as there’s a lot going on here, including some important presentations ahead.

A road map of what to expect and what to watch out for is often valuable if you want to avoid surprises.

We also examine key issues the companies here are facing as well as highlighting emerging scientific and clinical data of note on several relevant fronts.

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How to improve response rates with targeted therapies in oncology

Today we continue the second of a two part interview with a global thought leader who is also a scientist-clinician and well versed in cancer research as well as clinical trials.

Old Town Hall, Munchen

We explore how we can do clinical trials better in order to learn via a more rigorous process what works, what doesn’t, and why. After all, we we don’t know why certain approaches didn’t work or what the mechanisms of resistance are, how can we possibly improve?

Randomness is not necessarily a good thing in clinical research, especially if you don’t know what target you’re actually trying to hit!

If you missed the first part of this latest KOL interview and want to catch up then you can find it here (Link).

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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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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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