How much interest is there in the medical community in finding treatments for triple-negative breast cancer? Is this currently a "hot area" of researc

This is an exceptionally hot area of research in the breast cancer field. From the standpoint of being an unmet medical need, this is an area that many pharmaceutical companies are interested in as the therapeutic niches of estrogen-receptor-positive and HER2-positive breast cancer are already occupied with active agents. Whereas outside chemotherapy, we currently lack any targeted therapies for triple-negative breast cancer. So there is immense interest among drug developers, pharmaceutical companies, and breast cancer laboratory researchers in finding targeted therapies for these patients. Simply to call a cancer a triple-negative breast cancer to a certain extent points to some of the problem that we are dealing with. Imagine walking down the street, seeing a red-headed woman and turning to the person you are walking with and saying, "There is a non-blonde non-brunette who doesn't have a beard!" That is the current status of triple-negative breast cancer. We need to turn it from a negative definition into a biologically positive definition by coming up with therapeutic targeting of growth factors for triple-negative breast cancer. When we do so, we will have certainly advanced therapy for women with this disease.