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Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) has been one of the most difficult cancers to treat mainly because it doesn t offer much in the way of therapeutic targets, but that is starting to change. Triple-negative breast cancer, for many years at least, has not had a clear target that we can attack, Debu Tripathy, MD, chairman of the Department of Breast Medical Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, told
MedPage Today. It has always been a challenging subtype to treat. For hormone-receptor positive cancers we can use endocrine therapies, he explained. For HER2-positive cancers we can use HER2-targeted therapies, and these are quite effective. We still use chemotherapy in many of these cases, but we get an added advantage with the addition of the targeted agents. But for triple-negative, we haven t been able to find a very specific, unique target that can be harnessed as a drug.