Making the right choice in the adjuvant chemotherapy of primary breast cancer

Abstract

During the last few years, significant progress has been made in the adjuvant chemotherapy of primary breast cancer. When compared with anthracycline-based regimens, the addition of taxanes significantly improved disease-free survival and overall survival, and some studies suggest that many women could be treated without anthracyclines. In patients with HER2-positive tumours, adjuvant trastuzumab produced a significant reduction of mortality and recurrence in comparison with no adjuvant trastuzumab.Despite these dramatic achievements in the treatment of early breast cancer, several questions remain to be answered, and individualisation of adjuvant therapy should be further improved. In this regard, the application of new technologies (i.e. genomics and proteomics) may be of great value.