Dr Bruce Feinberg Highlights Use of Chemotherapy in Breast Cancer

Is chemotherapy really on its way out? Maybe not, said Bruce Feinberg, DO, vice president and chief medical officer of Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions.

In researching breast cancer, what were you looking at regarding the use of chemotherapy versus other drugs?

So, I’m trying to understand: is chemotherapy really going the way of the dodo? We thought maybe if we just focus on 1 cancer, a prevalent cancer, so we’ve had the story about lung cancer and now with the first-line metastatic disease being impacted by IO [immuno-oncology]-based therapy—checkpoint inhibitors—and the fact that there is a subset population that’s going to be managed with Tyrosine kinase inhibitor for EML4-ALK and EGFR… But what about breast cancer? Let’s take a very dominant, common cancer—it could have been colon, it could have been looking at lung again—but we took breast cancer to really look at the impact across a disease.

And it was interesting. Not only from a perspective of what percent of patients are currently managed with chemotherapy today, but if you look at the clinical trials and try to predict out 5 and 10 years, what percent of those patients will not only be receiving chemotherapy in some form of a combination with a precision medicine or an IO, but how many of those patients will be receiving chemotherapy only treatment, whether single agent sequential or combination therapy?