Advancing Breast Cancer Care

Dear Reader,

With the treatment landscape for breast cancer continuing to evolve, survival rates are increasing, and patients are doing better now than they have ever done before. But with evolving therapies comes complex decisions, and meetings like the 37th Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference help to bring healthcare providers in this space together to parse out the data behind those decisions.

In this issue of ONCOLOGY, we spoke with Patrick I. Borgen, MD, chair of surgery and director of the Breast Cancer Program at Maimonides Medical Center and the meeting’s program chair, on the current state of the field, and the evolution of treatment that he has witnessed and been a part of during his storied career. “I was there for [the] transition from mastectomy to lumpectomy, from mastectomy to breast conservation therapy,” Borgen says. “We played a significant role in the design, development, and popularization of sentinel node biopsy. The development of nipple-sparing mastectomy was reconstruction, [and] we were there at the very beginning of that.”

Borgen also discusses the need for a multidisciplinary approach to treatment, the lessening role of surgical treatment, and the rise of immunotherapy and targeted agents. “I think no one who really thought this through [years ago] felt that the future of prophylaxis would be radical surgery,” Borgen notes. “And so, the answer had to be medical, it had to be genetic, it had to be genomic.”

Also in this issue, you will read of 2 patient scenarios: A 43-year-old male with past history of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and a 70-year-old woman with newly diagnosed synchronous multiple primary lung cancer. How do we treat them? Our expert contributors go in depth on best practices and optimal treatments.

Within these pages, you will also find highlights from the 2020 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, and a breakdown of the FDA’s recent approval of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of patients with Bacillus Calmette-Guerin-unresponsive, high-risk, non-muscle invasive bladder cancer with carcinoma in situ.

I hope you find our journal helpful in caring for your patients through what is likely one of the most challenging times in their lives. As always, thank you for reading.

-Mike Hennessy, Sr.

Chairman and Founder of ONCOLOGY's parent company, MJH Life Sciences