Sibylle Loibl, Chief Executive Officer at the German Breast Group Research Company (GBG Forschungs GmbH), shared on LinkedIn:
“What if a clinical trial does not show the result we hoped for? That is not a failure. It is an important scientific finding.
The international phase III NSABP-B-59/GBG-96-GeparDouze trial has now been published in Nature Medicine. The study investigated whether adding the immunotherapy agent atezolizumab to chemotherapy could improve outcomes in people with early triple-negative breast cancer. A total of 1,550 patients were included.
The results are nuanced. In the overall population, adding atezolizumab did not lead to a statistically significant improvement in event-free survival. At four years, event-free survival was 85.2% with atezolizumab and 81.9% with placebo.
At the same time, the pathological complete response rate increased from 57.0% to 63.3%.
So what do we learn from this?
Above all, that triple-negative breast cancer is biologically more diverse than the name might suggest. Biomarker and subgroup analyses provide clues that some patients may benefit more from immunotherapy than others.
The next question is therefore not simply: Does the treatment work?
But rather: Who benefits – and who does not?
That is exactly where clinical research takes us next!”
Title: Atezolizumab in early triple-negative breast cancer: the randomized phase 3 NSABP B-59/GeparDouze trial
Authors: Sibylle Loibl, Gong Tang, Valentina Nekljudova, Priya Rastogi, Sivaramakrishna Rachakonda, Mattea Reinisch, Joshua Acosta, Andreas Schneeweiss, Christie Hilton, Sabine Seiler, Rohit Bhargava, Thomas Karn, Patricia Cortazar, Fernando Moreno, Jay Andersen, Stephani Christensen, Peter Klare, Sujatha Murali, Serafín Morales, Jens Huober, Jean-François Boileau, Álvaro Rodríguez-Lescure, Dominique Boudreau, Peter J. Polewski, Julia Teply-Szymanski, João Mouta, Eleftherios P. Mamounas, Carsten Denkert, Norman Wolmark, Charles E. Geyer Jr.
Read the full article.
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