Treatment of heavily pre-treated metastatic breast cancer (MBC) involves several lines of chemotherapy however, favourable side effect profile and a convenient mode of administration are important. Eribulin, is with proven activity in aggressive MBC however, there is paucity of real-world data from India and merits exploration.
We retrospectively analyzed, previously treated MBC patients who had at least 2 lines of prior therapy and received intravenous Eribulin at the dose of 1.4 mg/m2 on day 1 and 8 in 3 weekly cycles, between 2013 and 2019. To describe the clinical performance of eribulin we adopted the approach suggested by Dzimitrowicz and colleagues (J Clin Oncol. 2016; 34:3511e17); Tumour Response (TR) was defined as the proportion of physician-reported clinical or imaging (RECIST) response. Furthermore, we evaluated median Progression Free (PFS) and Overall Survival (OS) by the Kaplan Meier method. The patients were monitored for toxicity by CTCAE 4.3 criteria.
There were 78 patients with the median age of 53 (32-75) years, 2 (2.6%) had male breast cancer. The median number of previous chemotherapy lines was 5(2-7); visceral involvement was present in 76 (97.4%) patients with median of 3 organs (range 0-6) involvement and bones (61.5%) being most common site followed by lung (52.5%). A median of 3.5 (1-11) cycles of eribulin was administered. TR seen as partial responses in 35 (44.9%), stable disease in 9 (11.5%), and progressive disease in 34 (43.6%) patients. The median PFS was 3.0 months (95% CI: 2.2-3.8), and median OS was 7 (95% CI: 5.1-8.9) months. Interestingly, eribulin activity was unrelated to the number of previous lines and type of metastatic involvement. Eribulin was well tolerated with only 2 (2.5%) patients discontinuing therapy due to toxicity. Significant grade 3/4 toxicities seen included peripheral neuropathy in 10 (12.8%) which peaked after 6 cycles and neutropenia in 17 (21.8%) of patients while dose reductions were required in 6 (7.7%) of patients.
In this relatively large, single Institution, real practice analysis eribulin is an efficacious, safe and easy to administer option for pre-treated MBC and merits consideration.
The authors.
Has not received any funding.
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.