Every year, around 240,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. Every year, around 42,000 women die from cancer. Although survival rates have been increasing, constantly working to improve screening methods, treatments, and maintenance therapies is crucial to beating breast cancer.
Breast cancer is categorized based on if they 1) work with estrogen/progesterone receptors and if they 2) have high levels of the HER2 protein. Treatment strategies can then be personalized to the patient based on these factors. The general components of breast cancer treatment are surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and targeted therapy.
Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC)
Treatment is especially hard for TNBC patients as there are no definite hormonal causes for tumor development and progression. In these cases, chemotherapy is often the best bet as they don’t respond to hormonal therapies. However, advancements in our understanding of TNBC are helping researchers develop novel and effective drugs.
- Keytruda (Pembrolizuma) is an immunotherapy drug used in concomitance with chemotherapy. It inhibits the PD-L1 receptor on your cells, thereby enabling the immune cells to target tumor cells.
- Trodelvy has been approved for patients with TNBC that has metastasized to other parts of the body. It inhibits the Trop-2 antigen on tumor cells, leading to tumor cell death.
- PARP inhibitors have been approve to treat TNBC patients who have a BRCA mutation. These drugs stop the PARP protein from repairing damaged DNA, thereby leading to tumor cell death.
- Anti-androgens are also being explored for TNBC treatment. These are being tested for a specific androgen-positive subset of TNBC.
Learn more here.