Which breast cancer treatment is right for you

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In this video, Dr. Tufia Haddad discusses the current landscape of cancer treatment, particularly for metastatic breast cancer, highlighting the rapid development of new therapies and the importance of clinical trials.

Read the Transcript:

Tufia Haddad, M.D. : It is a really exciting time in cancer research as new therapies are being developed and brought to the clinic at a truly unprecedented rate.

Right now, every week, a new drug or a new purpose for an existing drug, is approved by the FDA for use in cancer treatment.

Your oncologist will be recommending different treatment options for you. Many times these are treatments that are already rigorously tested through multiple types of clinical trials before they are approved by the FDA and designated as being safe and effective for management of metastatic breast cancer.

It’s important, when you are talking with your oncologist, to see if there are options or if there is a single therapy that is recommended as the best option.

I’d also encourage patients to be asking their oncologists if there is a clinical trial opportunity. So often we think about clinical trials that are testing investigational therapies that are not yet approved by the FDA. We often think of those as something we reserve for the end, when all of our standard treatments are no longer working.

But the truth is, we are doing clinical trials at every step of the journey, including when patients have a new diagnosis. We are always building upon our current standard of care therapies to try and improve them, to find treatment options that have fewer toxicities, that are more effective than the ones that we’re already using today.

And so sometimes participating in a clinical trial may be the best option for you, but this is a discussion that you need to have with your oncologist. If you don’t have clinical trial opportunities at your local community oncology clinic, this is a great time to be thinking about getting a second opinion at a larger specialty center that has clinical trials open and available.

Often the benefit of being on a new therapy, or a recently FDA approved therapy, is that there is good research behind it to show that it is the most effective option at that time.

Some of the potential risks of receiving a therapy that was just recently approved for use is that we’re still getting experience with these medications, and we might not understand all of the side effects that are possible. We will definitely know the most common side effects and what to expect, and we will often provide you with a supportive care plan to help manage the known side effects.

But the potential risk or downside of being on a newer therapy is that there may be an unexpected side effect that we weren’t prepared for. Be assured in that setting, if that were to occur, your team will take great care of you and be sure to support you through that.

In order to find out information about emerging therapies or clinical trials, often, you can go to the websites of different specialty centers that offer clinical trials. Not only will they have a list and information about each clinical trial that they have available at their center, but they often will provide great information about what is a clinical trial. Is it right for me? What are the benefits? What are the potential downsides?

That information is often available, including our own mayoclinic.org, website. You can also look at national websites, so both the national institute of health as well as the FDA have excellent information about clinical trials, and their oversight of the clinical trials as well.

So the FDA has oversight to drug development for cancer therapies. As new treatments are being developed, initially in the laboratory, they will subsequently go through a series of clinical trials, initially looking at safety, then effectiveness, and then being compared head to head with our current standard of care therapies.

Now, if safety and effectiveness and being shown to be better than the therapies that we have today through phase one, two and three clinical trials, if all that happens, it is likely that the FDA would go on to approve that medication or combination of medications for management of metastatic breast cancer.

With all that information, you should be able to speak with your oncologist then to better understand what is the safety? What are the expected side effects? To understand the effectiveness, what are the odds that this medication will work for my cancer? That is the process by which the drugs go to FDA approval, and really they have to have been shown to be safe and effective in order to be available to patients.

When you are starting a new medication, there are questions that you should be thinking about in asking your oncologist or your care team. The first is to understand, what the medication or combination of medications. Is it given by IV? Is it an oral medication? How often do I take it? But then you also want to understand, you know, what does this drug do, or this combination of drugs do. How do they impact the cancer?

You might want to understand as well. What are the chances that this drug will work? Will it have the ability to shrink the cancer? How long on average, does this medication work?

You also would want to understand the potential side effects and what to expect, and that will help you to prepare for that first treatment session.

Today, we have many different cancer therapies for management of metastatic breast cancer. These all have gone through rigorous processes and clinical trials to show their safety and effectiveness for management today. Talk to your oncologist about what treatment is right for you. Ask questions so you can understand what to expect with that treatment regimen.

Know as well that sometimes participating in a clinical trial may be your best treatment option, really, at any phase of the journey. Either at a new diagnosis or when many standard treatments have shown to be no longer effective managing your cancer.

Mayo Clinic does not endorse companies or products. Advertising revenue supports our not-for-profit mission.