“Our understanding of metastatic disease is changing every day,” BCRF staffer Sadia Zapp poignantly noted during BCRF’s recent webinar focused on metastatic breast cancer (MBC). “We’re advancing treatments that will hopefully not just extend people’s lives, but help people live long, beautiful, wonderful, fulfilling lives as well.”
In honor of Metastatic Breast Cancer Awareness Day, BCRF hosted an MBC-focused webinar on recent treatment breakthroughs and the patient experience today. Joining Zapp were Dr. Joseph Sparano, a BCRF investigator and chair of the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai, and Amanda Quick, a member of the Board of Directors of the Pink Agenda who has been living with MBC since 2021.
Here, we recap three takeaways from their conversation. Watch the full video above and sign up for our email list to learn about future events.
Over the last decade—and especially in the last five years—the FDA has approved several new therapies for MBC including immunotherapies, CDK4/6 inhibitors, and antibody-drug conjugates. In fact, since 2016, 12 new treatments have been approved for MBC based on the clinical findings of BCRF investigators and others.
“The impact of these new drugs has been really remarkable, and I think we’re just scratching the surface of their potential impact,” he said. “For my first 20 years in the field, we saw a lot of drugs that made a tumor shrink a little bit and slightly prolonged disease control. It’s only been within the last five years that we’ve seen this explosion of drugs that can actually improve survival.”
Treatments like antibody-drug conjugates, too, have been associated with fewer side effects than systemic therapies like chemotherapy, giving some patients better quality of life. For patients like Amanda, who was diagnosed in 2021, this has meant that new options were there for her when she needed them.
“It’s absolutely remarkable to think that when I was diagnosed in 2021, there were drugs that were not yet FDA approved but that I have had the benefit of using [because they’ve been approved since then],” she said. “It’s a testament to research and how many things are coming down the pipeline. As someone living with MBC, every drug is a chapter, and you want really long chapters.”
In addition to his work as a clinician, Dr. Sparano has led groundbreaking clinical trials, including the BCRF-supported TAILORx, and he serves as deputy chair of the clinical trials network ECOG-ACRIN.
“Clinical trials can lead to really dramatic changes in therapy,” Dr. Sparano said.
Case in point: When Amanda was first diagnosed with MBC three years ago, her then-care team recommended she start chemotherapy. Dr. Sparano, her current doctor, believed, based on several clinical trials, that Amanda could instead start a CDK4/6 inhibitor and endocrine therapy, even though it wasn’t the standard of care.
Results from a subsequent trial, RIGHT Choice, found that for certain patients, like Amanda, with aggressive hormone-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer, that a CDK4/6 inhibitor plus endocrine therapy is more effective than chemotherapy.
Amanda, who was treated for many years without side effects like hair loss, said that it’s so important to focus on MBC patients’ quality of life.
“We don’t want to be just living with metastatic breast cancer, but thriving and having a life, too,” she said.
On the flip side of that, Amanda said, is that she often feels like she’s living with an invisible illness—navigating side effects and fertility loss that might not be apparent on sight.
“When I go to work, when I’m walking down the street, people don’t necessarily see me and think, ‘Oh, there’s a cancer patient,’” she said. “It can be a challenge for people to put two and two together to say, ‘Okay, wow, this is someone who is in this part of their life, going through cancer, but they’re also trying to work, travel, do other things. The narrative about MBC needs to change.”
Amanda said one of the most helpful pieces of advice she ever received was to liken navigating MBC to riding a surfboard.
“Sometimes you’re on it and you catch the perfect wave—you have that long chapter of a treatment where things are going great,” she said. “But then sometimes you fall off and it’s going to take a while to get back on. There are going to be ups and downs. Enjoy those good moments and then know that you’re going to get through some of the tougher ones.”
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