Every year, physician researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute reveal new treatments, protocols, and outcomes that advance cancer research. At one of this year’s biggest cancer research conferences, the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Berlin, Germany, Dana-Farber researchers presented 22 studies in breast, lung, and bladder cancer.
Here are three of the most exciting advancements — several nearing U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval — shared by our experts nearly 4,000 miles across the world.
An oral therapy for advanced breast cancer
Erica Mayer, MD, MPH, director of breast cancer clinical research in the Dana-Farber Breast Oncology Center, presented the first results from the global phase 3 evERA breast cancer randomized clinical trial.
This trial was designed to study a next-generation selective cancer oral therapy called giredestrant with everolimus — an immunosuppressant that secures to the cancer’s estrogen receptor and weakens its growth — for people with advanced ER+/ HER2 breast cancer who have already tried CDK4/6 treatments.
The trial consisted of 373 patients who either received the oral therapy giredestrant and everolimus or standard of care endocrine therapy plus everolimus. While the results are still early, progression-free survival improved from roughly five and a half months to more than 8 months in patients who received the oral therapy.
“Although we’ve made great progress in treating metastatic ER-positive, HER-2-negative breast cancer, these cancers can become resistant to existing therapies making them difficult to treat,” Mayer says. “The combination of giredestrant and everolimus is designed to address the most common resistance mechanisms. The evERA study is the first trial in this setting to show that using this new combination can substantially improve disease control compared to a standard of care combination regimen and may provide great benefit to a large number of patients with advanced breast cancer.”
Antibody-drug conjugate for metastatic cancer
Sara Tolaney, MD, MPH, chief of the division of Breast Oncology at Dana-Farber, shared the emerging role of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) in breast cancer treatment, which combine targeted treatment and chemotherapy to help patients in the first line of treatment of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
“We already had known that sacituzumab govitecan was more effective than standard chemotherapy in the pre-treated metastatic triple negative breast cancer setting and it is a drug that is FDA-approved to be utilized in the second line or later,” Tolaney says. “But this trial is really looking to see if it could be utilized in the first line setting.”
The study found that this ADC improved outcomes for patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer who were ineligible for immune checkpoint inhibitors. Results showed progression-free survival from roughly 7 months to just under 10 months. Tolaney says that using this ADC as a first line of standard of care treatment for this patient population opens new possibilities.
Targeting oncogenes for lung cancer
Pasi A. Jänne, MD, PhD, senior vice president for translational medicine at Dana-Farber, highlighted how there are strategies to target and prevent resistance in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by targeting a person’s oncogenes — a gene that causes cancer when mutated. NSCLC can occur when the normal lung cells grow abnormally, which can cause symptoms like shortness of breath, wheezing, and chest pain.
One of these oncogenes that causes lung cancer is the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). This study, called the FLAURA 2 trial, found that first-line osimertinib and chemotherapy improved overall patient survival compared to monotherapy in EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer.
“EGFR lung cancers make up about a third of lung cancers worldwide. There’s a global impact of the trial,” Jänne says.