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Tucatinib Prolongs Survival in Breast Cancer With Brain Mets

— Amy Tiersten, MD, calls the anti-HER2 agent a "game-changer"

MedpageToday

Adding tucatinib (Tukysa) to a trastuzumab-capecitabine (Herceptin-Xeloda) regimen significantly improved central nervous system outcomes versus placebo plus trastuzumab-capecitabine in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer and brain metastases at baseline, researchers reported at the .

In this exclusive ڴŮ video, , of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, offers her takeaways from the study results.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

One of the abstracts I was most excited about this year was the HER2CLIMB study. There's a new anti-HER2 agent, which is called tucatinib, and that drug was combined with a chemotherapy drug called capecitabine, and trastuzumab, versus a comparison to the trastuzumab and the capecitabine alone. And basically tucatinib is a game-changer for patients with brain metastasis -- metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer with brain metastases.

It showed in this particular subgroup of the ASCO abstract updated, was the particular results in patients with brain metastasis. And basically it showed a very in patients with brain metastasis that were HER2 positive.

I feel that based on the results of this very, very impressive data, that tucatinib will be the standard of care for all patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer with brain metastasis, regardless of the particular line of therapy that they're receiving.

This is the only study that I'm aware of that actually included patients who had completely untreated brain metastases. Many, many other trials allow patients who have had treated brain metastasis that are stable, but this allowed untreated disease.

What I think will be really interesting, because a large proportion of HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients do develop brain metastases, is whether this drug can be moved into the earlier-stage setting, potentially to prevent brain metastasis in the future. That would be a wonderful thing to be able to extend the benefit of this very active drug.

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    Greg Laub is the Senior Director of Video and currently leads the video and podcast production teams.