The Future of Chemotherapy and Patients with ER-Positive Breast Cancer

In this clip, Ruth O'Regan, MD discussed the future of chemotherapy as it relates to treating patients with breast cancer.

Transcript

I don't see us shying away from chemotherapy in breast cancer any time soon. Obviously It's incredibly important in HER2-positive cancers and also in [patients with] triple negative breast cancers. I do think we'll see less and less use in ER-positive breast cancers, because even if a patient has positive lymphnodes, biologically she may have a cancer with a low reccurence score isn't going to benefit from chemotherapy, so although her likelihood of recurrence would be higher than someone with a node negative breast cancer, giving her chemotherapy won't necessary impact that risk of recurrence. I do think what we'll see in the ER positive setting is less and less use of chemotherapy. The interesting thing is that even in those patients with the highest score cancers...most of them don't benefit from chemotherapy either but we do use it in those patients because we don't have better therapies at this timepoint, but maybe CDK inhibitors may be the answer in those patients.