Strategies Focusing on Immunologically Silent Tumors in Breast Cancer

Rita Nanda, MD, explains how researchers are aiming to make immunologically silent tumors more inflamed. This video was filmed at the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Rita Nanda, MD: Breast cancer has been behind other tumor types in terms of strategies for immunotherapy development, and I think that’s because historically breast cancers were believed to be immunogenically silent. There are certainly subsets of breast cancers that are immunogenically active and amenable to checkpoint inhibition, but still a large portion of breast cancers are not amenable to checkpoint inhibition. And so there are a number of strategies ongoing that are trying to turn immunogenically silent tumors into more inflamed tumors so that we can take advantage of immunotherapy strategies to help treat these types of diseases.