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The prognostic value of fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) and gallium-67 scan (GS) performed early after chemotherapy was assessed in 40 patients with newly diagnosed aggressive lymphoma. FDG-PET and GS were performed before and after three cycles of CHOP (cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone) or two cycles of ACVBP (doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, vindesine, bleomycin, prednisone), with or without rituximab. Thirty-five patients had diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), two had mantle-cell lymphoma and three had T-cell lymphoma. Four patients relapsed despite early negative FDG-PET and GS including all three patients with T-cell lymphoma. Nine patients stayed in remission despite positive FDG-PET and/or GS of whom five showed moderate intensity residual bone uptake. Seven of these nine early false positives had a negative exam at the end of treatment. In patients with DLBCL, the 2-year event-free survival was 85% for negative versus 30% for positive FDG-PET patients (P = 0.003) whereas it was 78% for negative versus 33% for positive GS patients (P = 0.018). Sensitivity, specificity and diagnostic accuracy of FDG-PET and GS were not significantly different: 90% versus 70%, 76 versus 80% and 80 versus 77%, respectively. We conclude that both FDG-PET and GS are valuable tools to early predict outcome in patients with DLBCL.

This is the first report of LTFU showing that anthracycline-free trastuzumab-based PST combined either with docetaxel and/or carboplatin can achieve, without cardiac toxicity, very competitive results in terms of pathological complete response, RFS and OS, in HER2+BC. The choice of this schedule could be proposed to patients with vascular contraindication for anthracyclines or because patient's or physician's preference for a taxane-only schedule.

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Background: Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) accounts for 15 to 20% of breast cancers. Despite initial chemosensitivity, patients with TNBC had a poor outcome with worse disease-free and overall survivals than others with non-triple-negative breast cancer. The aim of this single-center study was to describe clinical characteristics, pathologic complete response rate, disease-free survival and overall survival rates after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in TNBC.Methods: Forty six consecutive patients with TNBC were treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy at Georges-François Leclerc Cancer Center. Median follow-up lasted 6.3 years [4.4-10.5y]. Descriptive statistics were performed in this population. Survival rates were calculated according to Kaplan-Meier.Results: Clinical characteristics of patients were the followings: median age was 46 years [24-80y]; 24% had a breast neoplastic hereditary. Initial characteristics of tumors were: 4 T1 (9%), 25 T2 (54%), 17 T3 (37%), 18 N0 (39%), 25 N1 (54%), 3 N2 (7%); 12 grades II (26%), 31 grades III (68%) and 3 (6%) unknown. All the tumors were invasive ductal carcinomas. After neoadjuvant chemotherapy, tumors were classified as pT0 (33%), pT1 (35%), pT2 (30%), pT3 (2%), pN0 (67%) and pN+ (33%). Forty patients (87%) were treated with anthracyclines-based neoadjuvant therapy, 4 (9%) with taxanes and 2 (4%) with another regimen. Pathologic complete response rate was 28.2% according to Chevallier's classification. Forty-five patients (98%) had adjuvant radiotherapy and 20 (43%) had adjuvant chemotherapy. Median disease-free survival was 9.7years [4.4-ND]. The disease-free survival rate was 82.4% [66.6%-91.2%] and 44.8% [23.7%-64%] at 2 and 10 years respectively. Median overall survival was 10.2years [6.4-ND]. The overall survival rate was 97.4% [86.2%-99.6%] and 53.7% [31.8%-71.5%] at 2 and 10 years respectively.Conclusion: The pathologic complete response rate is consistent with that reported in other studies involving neoadjuvant chemotherapy of TNBC and higher than that observed in the other subgroups of breast cancer. However, disease-free and overall survivals are lower than in non triple-negative breast cancers, thereby confirming the worse prognosis of TNBC Citation Information: Cancer Res 2009;69(24 Suppl):Abstract nr 1103.