Adjuvant Therapy of Breast Cancer: Can We Do Better?

Can We Talk About Cure? Our answer is yes and no. ‘Yes’, we can talk about curable disease in some cases. A 60-year-old woman diagnosed with steroid receptor-positive HER2 overexpressing breast cancer, today has a high probability to reach her 80th year of life. So, in this group of patients, we can realistically talk of a good chance to be cured. But also ‘No’, we cannot talk about a curable disease. There are still patients who have an unfavorable prognosis. A 44-year-old patient with a basal-like tumor, that does not regress well on aggressive neoadjuvant chemotherapy still has a high probability to die early from metastatic breast cancer. Although some new drugs are in development (e.g. PARP-inhibitors), currently we do not have good measures to change the fate of these patients. Here are still limits.