Back to June 2008: Updates from the 2008 ASCO Annual Meeting
Big, positive news presented at ASCO?
- Question from Marcello: Doctors, overall did you take away a general sense of positive news and advances from this ASCO meeting, whether the changes and improvements were big or small?
- Answers —Carol Kaplan, M.D.: Absolutely. We are excitingly moving into an era of treating patients in a more targeted manner. Breast cancer research is moving away from treating a broad range of breast cancer patients with general anti-cancer drugs and moving towards the art of picking an individualized therapy for each subset of breast cancer, whether it be ER or PR positive or HER2 positive or associated with the BRCA mutations. Each year at ASCO, we find we're hearing yet another way to allow women to be survivors after breast cancer.
- Generosa Grana, M.D., F.A.C.P. : I would absolutely agree with that. It is an incredibly exciting time to be taking care of women with breast cancer. Metastatic disease is being approached more as a chronic disease and many of the exciting findings from advanced cancer are being moved to the early-stage setting where they are likely to have a greater impact on survival. The future holds tremendous promise for breast cancer patients.