Highlights from the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, San Francisco, USA, 12-15 May 2001

The goals of the ASCO annual meeting are to disseminate the latest and most worthwhile research data emerging from the fields of cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. The majority of these topics were covered to variable degrees in the field of breast cancer, with educational sessions focusing on current controversies and future directions, and scientific sessions filling in the gaps between our current standards and the active thrusts of research.In the following text numbers in parentheses, in the format '(#XX)', indicate the number of the abstract in the proceedings book for the meeting [1].Several randomized studies of standard versus high-dose chemotherapy with stem cell support for either high-risk adjuvant or metastatic therapy were presented. Three studies in the adjuvant setting (#80, #81, #148) failed to show a disease-free survival or overall survival advantage at 5 years for high-dose chemotherapy compared with standard or somewhat dose-escalated chemotherapy in women with multiple positive nodes. One trial (Pegase 01; #102) reported better relapse-free survival for the high-dose arm than the standard dose arm (71% versus 55%; P < 0.003), suggesting that longer follow-up of overall survival is required (the overall survival rates were equivalent in the two arms at 3 years follow-up). In the metastatic setting, the MA.16 study (#82) reported equivalent overall survi-val for the 219 patients who were randomly assigned to 2-4 additional cycles of anthracycline or taxane-based chemotherapy or to high-dose chemotherapy after an objective response to standard chemotherapy. In the same theme, several studies that compared standard with increased dose intensity anthracycline therapy (#146, #127) failed to show an advantage for the latter strategy.The prognostic and predictive role of HER2 continues to be a hot topic in breast cancer.Several studies (#85, #86) reported that benefit from trastuzumab is confined to women with HER2 (c-erbB2