Abraxane With or Without Tigatuzumab in Patients With Metastatic, Triple Negative Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths in American women. Metastatic disease including metastatic breast cancer unfortunately remains incurable. One reason is due to the inability to develop specific therapies for specific cancer subsets. The use of modern genomic techniques has significantly enhanced our recent understanding of breast cancer biology. Five distinct breast cancer subsets have been recognized, one of which is basal-like breast cancer. Basal-like breast cancer is typically estrogen receptor (ER) negative, progesterone receptor (PR) negative and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2-Neu) negative. This is referred to as triple negative breast cancer or TBNC. TBNC represents a significant proportion of breast cancer patients (10-20%) and has a poor prognosis with no targeted approach to therapy as of yet. Tigatuzumab is a humanized monoclonal antibody targeting a death receptor on the breast cancer cells. Previous studies have shown that combining antibodies with selected chemotherapy agents have induced tumor cell death. The hypothesis of this study is to use tigatuzumab and combine it with Abraxane to serve as a targeting agent in metastatic TBNC patients.