Optimizing care for geriatric cancer patients: the greatest challenge in medical oncology?

Fundamental progress has been achieved in the treatment of solid cancers over the last two decades and patients’ long-term outcome has improved accordingly. With monoclonal antibodies, small-molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitors and more recently, immune checkpoint modulators, a plethora of highly active novel drugs has become available. But are truly all patients benefitting from these successes? In an elderly population of breast cancer patients, the HER2-positive subtype was still associated with the worst prognosis as shown in a recent publication [1] despite the excellent survival results achieved within clinical trials [2]. …