Metastatic breast cancer—optimal front-line therapy

Front-line therapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

BACKGROUND Historically, alkylator-based therapy has been used to treat patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). More effective therapies, such as the use of monoclonal antibodies in combination with chemotherapy, have been shown to prolong both progression-free survival and overall survival. Improvements in the identification of prognostic markers for CLL, as well as novel combination...

First line chemotherapy of metastatic breast cancer.

In the last 20-30 years the approach to metastatic breast cancer by chemotherapy has been largely studied. Anthracyclines, taxanes and, more recently, capecitabine and gemcitabine represent the breakthrough of treatment. In the next future the combination of chemotherapy and target therapy will be considered more frequently.

First line therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Metastatic pancreatic cancer remains a difficult disease to treat; however, there are more new drug combinations on the horizon each week. We will discuss the results of the MPACT trial presented at the 2013 ASCO Annual Meeting (Abstracts #4005, #4058, and #4059) and compare to the 2011 FOLFIRINOX data.

HER2-directed therapy for metastatic breast cancer.

Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) overexpression drives the biology of 20% of breast cancers, and predicts a poor prognosis for patients. HER2-targeted therapies significantly improve outcomes for HER2-positive patients with both early and metastatic breast cancer. Currently three HER2-targeted agents, trastuzumab (Herceptin), lapatinib (Tykerb), and pertuzumab (Perjeta), are avai...

Breast Cancer Postanthracycline Therapy for Metastatic Disease