According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer accounts for 30% of all newly diagnosed female cancers annually, and women have a 1 in 8 chance of developing the disease in their lifetime. For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation and the Breast Cancer Alliance hosted a webinar on the potential impact of cancer immunotherapies for the treatment of breast cancer. Four distinguished researchers presented their work, illustrating the dynamic and iterative process in which preclinical research informs clinical trials, and how the findings from the clinical trials refine and enhance future work.
Moderators
Suzanne LeBlang, MD
Director of Clinical Relationships
Focused Ultrasound Foundation
Yonni Wattenmaker, MA
Executive Director
Breast Cancer Alliance
Speakers
Andrew Davis, MD
Assistant Professor of Oncology
Washington University in St. Louis
Dr. Davis is a breast medical oncologist. He completed his residency and hematology/oncology training at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, including serving as a chief fellow during his final year of training. In 2020, he was appointed as an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. As a clinical investigator, his primary research interests include circulating tumor DNA and the development of novel therapies for patients with metastatic breast cancer through innovative early-phase clinical trials.
His presentation will focus on a Phase I clinical trial combining trastuzumab, deruxtecan, and neratinib that is currently open and enrolling patients through the National Cancer Institute. He will discuss the preclinical rationale for the study, the specific drugs that are being evaluated, the study design, and future directions regarding how these therapies may help patients with breast cancer in the future.
Patrick Dillon, MD
Associate Professor of Oncology in the Division of Hematology/Oncology
University of Virginia (UVA)
Dr. Dillon is a medical oncologist who specializes in breast cancer treatment. He leads the breast medical oncology research team and is chairman of the data safety monitoring committee at UVA. He has been designing and leading clinical and translational clinical trials in breast cancer for 15 years.
Dr. Dillon will be discussing clinical trials using focused ultrasound for the treatment of breast cancer and the ways in which focused ultrasound treatment may augment immune-mediated control of advanced breast cancers. He will focus on human clinical trials and explain how clinical trials interface with preclinical research.
Natasha Sheybani, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Research Director, UVA Focused Ultrasound Cancer Immunotherapy Center
University of Virginia (UVA)
Dr. Sheybani’s work is centered on engineering innovative tools and paradigms that render cancer management less invasive, less toxic, more effective, and more personalized for cancer patients. Her team is advancing applications of focused ultrasound for non-surgical tumor debulking, immuno-modulation, and immunotherapy delivery in highly complex and aggressive cancer settings, including metastatic breast cancer and brain tumors.
Dr. Sheybani will share some vignettes from her group’s investigations of focused ultrasound (FUS) technology as an emerging non-invasive tool for improving the efficacy and safety of immunotherapies in breast cancer (primary and metastatic). They have developed strategies for locoregional ablation combined with immune adjuvants (e.g. CD40 agonism) for in-situ vaccination in primary tumors. They have also developed strategies for potentiation of cellular immunotherapies (e.g. CAR T cell therapy) with blood brain/tumor barrier opening in brain metastases. They are also exploring the use of multimodal imaging and noninvasive biomarkers for adaptation and tuning of combination treatment paradigms. All of these approaches to be discussed interface with UVA’s rich pipeline for clinical translation as home to the world’s first and only FUS Cancer Immunotherapy Center.
Polina Weitzenfeld, PhD
Research Associate, Molecular Genetics and Immunology Laboratory
Rockefeller University
Dr. Weitzenfeld is a research associate at the laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at the Rockefeller University in New York. Her graduate studies were focused on studying the mechanisms that lead to dissemination of breast tumor cells and formation of remote metastasis. Previously the head of clinical trials at an Israeli start-up, where she helped develop a device for early detection of cervical cancer, her current role involves engineering antibodies to improve cancer immunotherapies.
She will discuss her team’s work re-engineering antibodies, which has led to a potent anti-tumor response in preclinical studies, with fewer toxicities. She will also share details of their first-in-human clinical trial that helped validate that the antibody treatment promotes effective and systemic antitumor immune responses, prompting ongoing phase II studies.