SABCS 2023 Includes New Data in Breast Cancer, Special Session on Disparities

Virginia Kaklamani, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at UT Health San Antonio and co-director of San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), highlighted several noteworthy sessions at SABCS that detail clinically significant and potentially altering data, present research on various subtypes of breast cancer, and overview present disparities in this disease.

At SABCS 2023, Kaklamani will also be participating in a panel discussion about new drug approvals in the realm of metastatic breast cancer as well as moderating a plenary session on advancements in triple-negative breast cancer.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What are you excited about going into SABCS 2023? Are there any sessions you would like to highlight?

I'm excited about several sessions. Some of them are educational sessions, and some of them are our general sessions where we go over new research. The educational sessions that I'm excited about is we have a session on prevention of breast cancer, which is going to take place on Tuesday, we have an educational session on lobular cancer, and then we also have an educational session on inflammatory breast cancer, which is our people's choice. This was where we asked our audience to vote on what educational session they want to be hearing at SABCS and this was the winner.

As far as the general sessions, there's several new data that is going to be presented. We have data from a very clinically important trial on tucatinib and T-DM1 [ado-trastuzumab emtansine] in the treatment of metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer. That's called the HER2CLIMB-02 trial. We're going to have data on 2 new adjuvant clinical trials on immunotherapy in patients with HR-positive breast cancer: the KEYNOTE-756 and the CheckMate 7FL trial. Both are looking at immunotherapy in the early-stage setting. And we're going to look at biomarkers there to see if there are specific biomarkers of response.

And there are several surgical and radiation oncology abstracts that I think are going to be practice changing. The NSABP B-51 trial is going to look at the use of radiation therapy instead of surgery for patients that have had neoadjuvant chemotherapy, and then the IDEA trials is going to look at the admission potentially already in younger women with early-stage breast cancer. So, we'll see how all of these come up, but I think there's going to be some practice-changing data presented.

Are there any themes or additional noteworthy sessions you would like to highlight ahead of SABCS 2023?

We've tried to touch on pretty much every aspect of breast cancer. We are also looking at disparities, and there's a wonderful special session on disparities. We're looking at different subtypes of breast cancers like the lobular, like the inflammatory breast cancer. We're looking at different therapies, we're looking at resistance in all types of breast cancer, mostly estrogen-positive breast cancer. So, we're really trying to globally attack breast cancer, and to me, honestly, prevention is the key to the cure. So, hopefully, the session on prevention will shed some light as to how much work we still have ahead of us to be able to cure breast cancer.