Welcome to the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS)! 

TOUCH, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance unofficially kicked off SABCS with their Navigating the Black Breast Cancer Experience event on Monday. Two panels discussed the role of navigation in Black Breast Cancer from the provider perspective as well as the patient perspective. TOUCH launched their TOUCH Care program in 2023 to facilitate the clinical trial process for Black women by providing a nurse navigator service to assist and support Black women in select clinical trials. Based on the ongoing success of that program, TOUCH and Unite For HER partnered this October to launch Care for HER with a mission to improve the lives of Black Breast Cancer patients by providing 24/7 personal nurse navigational support and integrative therapies and services directly to patients at no personal cost. Black breast cancer patients can apply for Care for HER here.

We’ve also heard from you, the TNBC community, about what SABCS news you care about most, including updates on: 

the TNBC vaccine
Signatera
results from ongoing clinical trials, like the ZEST study

In the coming days, we will make sure to update you on any and all information about these topics and everything TNBC!

Follow @tnbcfoundation, @touchbca, and @cancerfashionista to learn more about research announcements during the week and throughout the coming year. And stay tuned for more updates on TNBC-specific research from SABCS!

The past two days featured lots of research that focused on neoadjuvant treatments. Neoadjuvant just means any treatment that happens before surgery. For example:

• According to one study presented at SABCS 2024, adding pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC)—chemotherapy given before surgery—could improve survival outcomes in TNBC (Kim J, Park K, Shin J, et al.).
• Intensity Therapeutics, Inc reported on their INVINCIBLE-2 Study, which looked at a drug called INT230-6 that is administered directly into the tumor through an injection. They found that when the drug was injected into the tumor neoadjuvantly (before surgery), it caused tumor shrinkage or tumor death in a large percentage of patients. The drug also may trigger an anti-cancer immune response that helps to fight the tumor before surgery. 

One early phase trial also stirred up some interest over the past few days. BioNTech presented findings from a small, early phase clinical trial of a medicine called BNT-327 that showed good early results in a group of TNBC patients. BNT-327 is an immunotherapy, a type of medicine that helps to boost your immune system so that it can do a better job of recognizing and fighting cancer cells. It targets two important cancer proteins—PD1 or PD-L1 and VEGF. The trial showed that patients with locally advanced or metastatic TNBC that took BNT-327 with nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) had an 18-month overall survival rate of 69.7%. BioNTech plans to start a BNT327 phase 3 trial in 2025.

Another study found that patients with genetic BRCA mutations who were diagnosed with TNBC at or before 40 years old and also had a risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy—a surgical procedure to remove one or both ovaries and fallopian tubes—had a 56% lower risk of death than patients who didn’t have the surgery.  The same study found that patients with genetic BRCA mutations who were diagnosed with TNBC at or before 40 years old and had a bilateral risk-reducing mastectomy—a surgery to remove one or both breasts—had lower rates of recurrence, secondary breast and/or ovarian malignancies, and higher rates of survival than those who didn’t have the surgery. 

This morning, Melissa Davis, PhD, Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator at the Morehouse School of Medicine Institute of Translational Genomic Medicine,

gave a plenary lecture entitled The Grand Challenge of Unraveling Social vs. Biological Drivers of Racial Disparities in Cancer Outcomes. Dr. Davis spoke about her Grand Cancer Challenge SAMBAI project, which has begun to look more closely at the social and biologic drivers of Black Breast Cancer. You can read more about Dr. Davis’s work here. 

Today is the last day of SABCS 2024! Here are the biggest updates from the final day of the conference:

Circulating tumor DNA—small fragments of DNA that cancer cells shed into the bloodstream—can help to detect when, or if, cancer cells are present in the body sooner after treatment. Through the ZEST study, researchers hoped to see if niraparib (ZEJULA) could increase disease-free survival in breast cancer patients who were ctDNA-positive after treatment. The ZEST study was stopped early because of issues enrolling enough participants that were ctDNA positive.

The TNBC vaccine has caused quite the buzz in the research and patient world over the past year. While there was no new research presented at SABCS this year, we do know that there will be a phase 2 study of the TNBC vaccine to evaluate how effective and safe it is. The trial will start in 2025 and will likely last 2-3 years. 

And another neoadjuvant treatment has shown promise in the early or locally advanced TNBC space. Reminder: Neoadjuvant just means any treatment that happens before surgery. Phase 3 data from the CamRelief study presented today showed that adding camrelizumab to neoadjuvant chemotherapy increased pathologic complete response rates compared to neoadjuvant chemotherapy without camrelizumab. Pathologic complete response means that a doctor does not see any signs of cancer in a tissue sample taken after cancer treatment.

Remember to follow @tnbcfoundation, @touchbbca, and @cancerfashionista to learn more about research announcements throughout the coming year. You can also find research updates on the brand new Black TNBC Sanctuary website, under the Research Updates tab. The Black TNBC Sanctuary is a safe and trusted home for Black and Afro-Latina individuals diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer and their loved ones. Here, you can find everything you need to understand your specific diagnosis and feel equipped to make the best decisions for you.