Targeted Therapy in Metastatic Breast Cancer:Highlights from ASCO 2009

Background: Metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is an incurable disease. The medium survival of MBC is 2-3 years with the aim of treatment focusing on symptom control and quality of life (QOL). Despite the availability of

Background： Metastatic breast cancer （MBC） is an incurable disease. The medium survival of MBC is 2-3 years with the aim of treatment focusing on symptom control and quality of life （Q.OL）. Despite the availability of many new drugs, the overall survival （OS） of MBC has not changed significantly for the past decades. The clinical research of MBC has been focused on the development of targeted cytotoxic or biological therapy that will increase the therapeutic ratio to increase the efficacy and decrease the toxicity in MBC. The utility of targeted therapy depends largely on the identification and validation of molecular markers that will be prognostic to risk stratify patients in order to offer more aggressive therapy or predictive in order to select specific therapy. At the ASCO 2009, many prognostic markers have been validated or revalidated including the MammaPrint, uPA/PAI- 1, PARP-1, HER-2 and VEGF, while SPARC, TOP2A and CYP2D6 warranted further investigation. Over-expression of RAD51, a DNA repair gene, was found to be associated with increased risk of LRR and death in locally advance breast cancer, while sereum Vit D was not prognostic in postmenopausal breast cancer patients.