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Loay Kassem: If your patient can’t afford a CDK4/6 inhibitor, don’t settle down for endocrine therapy alone

Loay Kassem/X

Jan 19, 2025, 04:47

Loay Kassem: If your patient can’t afford a CDK4/6 inhibitor, don’t settle down for endocrine therapy alone

Loay Kassem, Assistant Professor and a Clinical Oncologist at Kasr AlAiny School of Medicine, Cairo University, shared a post on LinkedIn about a paper by him and colleagues published in Journal of Chemotherapy:

“If your patient can’t afford CDK4/6 inhibitor, Don’t settle down for endocrine therapy alone.

The price of palbociclib, ribociclib and abemaciclib is a major challenge for metastatic ER+ Breast cancer. Many patients in resource-limited settings don’t have access which cause great frustration. What to do then?

In our cancer center in Cairo University, we tested adding metronomic capecitabine to first-line aromatase inhibitor in a small randomized study that (despite small sample size) showed a positive trend towards better progression-free survival (PFS) versus hormonal therapy alone.

This is the link to our recently published manuscript led by my dear professor Hamdy Azim and my dear friend Mariam Saleh.

Fortunately for our patients, the MECCA study, which is a larger phase III Chinese study with a very similar design showed not only improvement in PFS but also overall survival.

This is great news for patients with no access to CDK4/6 inhibitors.

My conclusion: single agent aromatase inhibitor is not an acceptable first-line therapy for most patients with metastatic ER+/HER2- breast cancer in 2025.”

“Combination of metronomic capecitabine and letrozole in metastatic hormone receptor positive, HER2 negative breast cancer: a randomized phase II trial”

Authors: Hamdy Azim, Mariam Saleh, Passant Essam Eldin, Ahmed Abdelhafeez, Mohamed Hassan and Loay Kassem.

Loay Kassem: If your patient can't afford a CDK4/6 inhibitor, don't settle down for endocrine therapy alone

More posts featuring Loay Kassem.

Loay Kassem is an Assistant Professor and a Clinical Oncologist at Kasr AlAiny School of Medicine, Cairo University, He is also a Consultant of Clinical Oncology at Cairo Cure Oncology Center.

Previously, he served as a Lecturer of Clinical Oncology at the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University. His primary research interests include enhancing clinical research and contributing to impactful publications in the field of oncology.

Ahmed Abdelhafeez Breast Cancer Cairo University cancer CDK4/6 inhibitor endocrine therapy Hamdy Azim Loay Kassem Mariam Saleh MECCA Mohamed Hassan OncoDaily Oncology Passant Essam Eldin

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