ESMO 2019: breast cancer

This articles reviews results of relevant breast cancer trials presented at the 2019 ESMO Meeting. In triple-negative disease, addition of pembrolizumab to standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy yielded a pathologic complete response (pCR) rate of 64.8%, the highest pCR rate reported to date in this setting; in addition, a trend towards improved event-free survival was observed in the immunotherapy group. In pretreated patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, single-agent pembrolizumab was not superior to conventional chemotherapy. In metastatic hormone-receptor positive disease, an update of the MONARCH2 and MonaLEEsa‑3 studies indicated an overall-survival benefit in favour of the respective CDK4/6 inhibitor groups emphasizing the clinical importance of this class of drugs.