Publications by authors named "Sausan Abouharb"

Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the effectiveness of the anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody panitumumab combined with carboplatin and paclitaxel for treating chemotherapy-resistant triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients.
  • It included 43 patients who had not sufficiently responded to prior doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide treatment, achieving a combined pathological complete response/residual cancer burden class I rate of 30.2%.
  • The results indicate that panitumumab shows promise as part of neoadjuvant therapy for TNBC, warranting further evaluation in larger clinical trials.
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  • Recent research focuses on the phosphoinositide 3-kinase pathway in breast cancer, highlighting the role of PTEN as a crucial component.
  • The study aimed to investigate PTEN expression changes in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients and assess if next-generation sequencing (NGS) could effectively identify PTEN loss, serving as an alternative to traditional immunohistochemistry (IHC).
  • Findings revealed inconsistencies in PTEN expression between pretreatment and post-treatment samples, with some tumors showing intratumoral heterogeneity and overlapping copy numbers, suggesting that testing multiple specimens may be necessary for accurate assessment in clinical trials.
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  • High stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs) positively correlate with improved pathologic complete response (pCR) in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), suggesting their potential as a predictive marker for treatment outcomes.
  • A study involving 408 TNBC patients assessed various clinical and biomarker features, identifying thresholds for sTILs and Ki-67 to predict pCR, resulting in specific groups of patients likely benefiting from treatment de-escalation.
  • The research demonstrated that combining high sTILs with high Ki-67 significantly increased the accuracy of predicting pCR rates, indicating a promising approach for refining patient selection in neoadjuvant clinical trials.
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High stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs) are associated with an improved pathologic complete response (pCR) and survival in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). We hypothesized that high baseline sTILs would have a favorable prognostic impact in TNBC patients without a pCR after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT). In this prospective NACT study, pretreatment biopsies from 318 patients with early-stage TNBC were evaluated for sTILs.

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  • * The phase II trial of mirvetuximab soravtansine (an antibody drug conjugate) for treating FRα-positive metastatic TNBC included 96 patients but revealed that only 10% of patients screened had FRα positivity.
  • * The study was halted early due to low FRα positivity and ineffective treatment outcomes, suggesting that further research should focus on developing better patient selection strategies rather than continuing with mirvetuximab-s as currently administered.
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CDK 4 and 6 inhibitors (CDK4/6i), which arrest unregulated cancer cell proliferation, show clinical efficacy in breast cancer. Unexpectedly, a patient treated on a CDK4/6i-based trial, as first-line therapy in metastatic breast cancer, developed rapid disease progression following discontinuation of study drug while receiving standard second-line therapy off trial. We thus sought to expand this observation within a population of patients treated similarly at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

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Metaplastic breast cancer is a rare subtype of invasive mammary carcinoma, with an aggressive behavior and usually poor outcome. Responses to systemic chemotherapy are suboptimal compared to patients with standard invasive ductal carcinoma. Limited data are available in regards to best treatment modalities, including chemotherapy.

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Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most common tumors to involve the leptomeninges. We aimed to characterize clinical features and outcomes of patients with LMD based on BC subtypes. We retrospectively reviewed records of 233 patients diagnosed with LMD from BC between 1997 and 2012.

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Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men worldwide, accounting for approximately 242,000 new cases and 28,000 deaths annually in the USA. Although localized disease is often curable, advanced disease is generally not, especially when the cancer becomes castration-resistant and metastasizes to bone. Fortunately, advances in research have led to the recent approval of several novel therapies for the treatment of metastatic disease, and many other promising agents are in development.

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