Extending Survival for Patients With TNBC: Are You Up to Date on New Treatment Standards?

Extending Survival for Patients With TNBC: Are You Up to Date on New Treatment Standards? is organized by Med-IQ. 

Initial Release Date: August 2, 2019
Expiration Date: August 1, 2020

Target Audience:
This activity is intended for physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other providers who manage the health of beneficiaries in the federal healthcare system.

Accreditation:
Med-IQ designates this enduring material for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

This nursing activity has been approved for up to 1.0 contact hour / 0.1 CEU.

Overview:
This accredited CME/CE publication reviews current data from late-stage clinical trials on checkpoint-inhibitor use in advanced and metastatic triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). It also identifies immune-related adverse events associated with these treatments, provides strategies to manage such events, and offers patient-monitoring recommendations. These discussions are framed in the context of providing care for those with TNBC within the Veterans Health Administration.

Statement of Need:
Healthcare professionals who work within the federal healthcare system manage approximately 50,000 incident cancer diagnoses each year. Of these cases, approximately 0.8% represent women with breast cancer, and an even smaller proportion of these involve the most aggressive breast cancer subtype, triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). Although TNBC is a rarely seen cancer in the federal healthcare system, it is important that clinicians be able to optimally manage it when it does present, especially given the emerging, life-extending treatment advances. In early 2019, the FDA approved the combination of atezolizumab and nab-paclitaxel as first-line therapy for women with recurrent or metastatic TNBC positive for programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression. Shortly thereafter, guideline recommendations for TNBC were updated to include this combination regimen as the preferred regimen in this disease and treatment setting. To apply these treatment advances to practice, providers in the federal healthcare system must be able to assess tumor PD-L1 expression to select patients for immunotherapy as well as be able to support those receiving this treatment. Additionally, providers must understand the monitoring and management practices required to properly assess response and identify and manage potential treatment-emergent, immune-related adverse events.

Learning Objectives:
• Evaluate clinically relevant data on ICIs for early stage and metastatic TNBC
• Identify patients with TNBC who may benefit from treatment with ICIs and/or be eligible for enrollment in clinical trials
• Monitor patients receiving ICIs to assess treatment response and manage irAEs