Dr Kevin Kalinsky Shares Real-World Data on Effects of Sacituzumab Govitecan-hziy in TNBC

Ahead of ESMO 2023, Kevin Kalinsky, MD, MS, of Glenn Family Breast Center, highlighted the important aspects of sacituzumab govitecan-hziy in the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer and the real-world data validating it as an effective standard-of-care option for affected patients.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

Can you give an overview of sacituzumab govitecan-hziy in the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer?

Sacituzumab govitecan-hziy is an antibody-drug conjugate. So it's an antibody that is a linker that's attached to a payload. It has been approved for patients with triple-negative breast cancer, based upon the results of a large, randomized phase 3 trial called the Ascent study. We also have approval of sacituzumab govitecan-hziy for patients with endocrine-resistant, estrogen-driven HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer and that is also based upon a large randomized phase 3 trial called the TROPiCS-02 study. In both of these studies, sacituzumab govitecan-hziy was compared to physician-choice chemotherapy, and we saw overall survival benefits in both of those trials.

What are some highlights from the real-world data supporting this treatment as a standard-of-care option?

For our patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, the approval of sacituzumab govitecan-hziy was the first antibody-drug conjugate to be approved in this disease type. One of the questions that we had was about how sometimes the clinical trial population doesn't always reflect what we see in the real world, and so that was the rationale for undergoing this analysis. What we saw was that what was reflected in the phase 3 trial is also seen in the real-world analysis that we did.

To be specific, we saw for patients who were treated with sacituzumab govitecan-hziy that the median real-world overall survival was about 14 months. For those who were treated later on, the overall survival was a little bit less: approximately 10 months or so. The drugs seemed to be well-tolerated with the adverse events that we would otherwise expect to see based upon the Ascent trial. But the other thing that's a bit important to just mention in terms of this analysis is that, approximately, a quarter of patients were identified as Black. We have seen in other studies, including the Ascent study, that the rate of underrepresented minorities can be underrepresented in these trials. And it was good to see that there was no impact on efficacy or tolerability across the diversity that was represented in our real-world analysis.