Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to share the peer-reviewed highlights of the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held in San Antonio, Texas, from December 9 to 13, 2014.

MD Conference Express ^® provides timely, peer-reviewed highlights of high-impact presentations from the live conference, long before they are published in the academic literature, and is a trusted education resource. The articles selected for this issue underwent a rigorous 5-step peer-review process to ensure their accuracy and provide a reliable interim information source prior to the research being vetted by the standard journal peer-review process.

The articles in this issue of MD Conference Express represent the most compelling topics of relevance to a broad array of practitioners and have the potential to influence clinical practice.

Among the clinical trial highlights presented at the meeting, the phase III SOFT trial demonstrated there was no overall benefit for the addition of ovarian suppression to tamoxifen compared to tamoxifen alone in premenopausal women with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer. However, in the cohort of women who remained premenopausal after chemotherapy, there was a significant improvement with the addition of ovarian suppression to tamoxifen, a practice-changing result. The BOLERO-1 study found that progression-free survival was not improved by adding everolimus to weekly trastuzumab and paclitaxel first-line treatment of HER2-positive advanced breast cancer. The TNT trial showed that outcomes were similar with carboplatin and docetaxel in women with advanced triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). However, in women with BRCA1/2 gene mutations, carboplatin improved outcomes, including the objective response rate and PFS.

The feature articles summarize lectures on pharmacogenomics, including genome-wide association and functional genomic studies, and molecular profiling, which have provided insights into the new biology of breast cancer and identified mutations in estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer that are targets for genome-directed therapeutics.

The selected update articles provide reviews of the genomic complexity and heterogeneity of TNBC that are hindering the development of effective treatment strategies, and current perspectives on neoadjuvant therapy for ER-positive breast cancer, including novel targeted agents. Rounding out this edition are articles on evidence-based adjuvant endocrine therapy and the identification of the drivers of metastatic breast cancer.

We hope that you find the articles and practical perspectives that are contained in the pages of this issue of MD Conference Express helpful in integrating this new information into your clinical practice. For more information, please visit www.mdconferencexpress.com.