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Trials recruiting now, the landmark trials, the trials held by this cancer's subtypes, the key papers and what they mean, the latest literature, and the milestones year by year.
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213 trials on record are attached to one of the types below rather than to Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) itself. They are grouped by the type that holds them, so someone still working out which type they have can see the whole field from here.
The 48 most recent of 110 papers; see them all →
NCCN is the source of the category grades on the triple-negative breast cancer page and the first major guideline to place an antibody-drug conjugate first line for the disease.
Residual-disease testing may not need the tumour to be sequenced first, which would remove the slowest step of tumour-informed assays; the comparison with tumour-informed results in the same patients is the evidence that matters.
The latest in a line of negative targeted-therapy trials in triple-negative disease (EGFR, VEGF, iniparib, now AKT): a modest delay in progression that did not translate into survival, in the same year that an antibody-drug conjugate did. It is why the roadmap treats pathway-targeted small molecules as the road not taken.
The first-line overall survival result that made an antibody-drug conjugate the standard for PD-L1-negative or immunotherapy-ineligible metastatic triple-negative disease, and the reason the sequencing question (which TROP2 drug first, what after it) is now urgent.
Three-quarters of chemotherapy-naive TNBC would be low or ultralow by the DESTINY-Breast06 definitions, but ultralow is unlabelled in TNBC and carries no prognostic weight.
This is what the NHS R208 pathway yields in practice: a one-in-seven positive rate among the eligible, at the cost of clinician time spent on eligibility scoring.
Answers the two questions that hung over adjuvant olaparib, durability and late leukaemia, in its favour; the remaining question is whether carriers who also received pembrolizumab or capecitabine, whom the trial did not study, get the same benefit.
An argument for universal rather than criteria-based germline testing at diagnosis, with turnaround fast enough to inform surgery; for TNBC patients, who are already eligible, the lesson is timing.
Query for this cancer: (TITLE:"Triple-negative breast cancer" OR ABSTRACT:"Triple-negative breast cancer" OR TITLE:"TNBC" OR ABSTRACT:"TNBC" OR TITLE:"ER negative PR negative HER2 negative" OR ABSTRACT:"ER negative PR negative HER2 negative" OR TITLE:"all three receptors negative" OR ABSTRACT:"all three receptors negative" OR TITLE:"receptor negative breast cancer" OR ABSTRACT:"receptor negative breast cancer" OR TITLE:"grade 3 triple negative breast cancer" OR ABSTRACT:"grade 3 triple negative breast cancer") AND (treatment OR therapy OR trial OR survival OR diagnosis). Results are unfiltered search hits about Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), not a curated reading list.
Slamon and colleagues, 189 tumours. With the oestrogen and progesterone receptor assays it completed the three tests whose absence defines triple-negative disease.
Struewing and colleagues, 5,318 volunteers, three founder variants carried by over 2 percent of the population; Górski described the Polish BRCA1 founder set in 2000.
Perou and Sørlie's expression profiling separates basal-like from luminal breast cancers.
Sørlie's independent data sets and Foulkes's cytokeratin 5/6 stain (odds ratio 9.0) linked hereditary and basal-like disease; Atchley (2008) found 57 percent of BRCA1 carriers' cancers triple-negative.
Carey and colleagues, 496 cases; 16 percent in other women. California registry data (2007) fixed the wider demography of younger, Black, Hispanic and poorer women with worse survival at every stage.
Defined by absence of ER, PR, HER2; recognised as the subtype with the fewest treatment options, which set the research agenda that followed.
Symmans graded residual disease after neoadjuvant chemotherapy; Dent's Toronto cohort showed distant relapse hazard ratio 2.6 peaking at three years and fading after five.
Liedtke: pathological complete response 22 vs 11 percent yet worse survival, driven by residual disease. Lin: 46 percent of metastatic patients developed brain metastases; median survival 13.3 months.
Mostly triple-negative tumours with epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and stem-cell features (Prat, Breast Cancer Research); re-defined as a phenotype across subtypes in 2020.
Lehmann and colleagues, 587 tumours: basal-like 1 and 2, immunomodulatory, mesenchymal, mesenchymal stem-like, luminal androgen receptor; refined to four in 2016 (Burstein reached a similar four in 2015).
TP53 80%, PTEN loss 35%, RB1 loss 20% in basal-like disease and a likeness to serous ovarian cancer (Nature); Shah's 104 TNBC genomes show a continuous spectrum of clonal complexity.
GeparSixto and CALGB 40603 show platinum increases pathologic complete response.
Copson and colleagues, 2,915 women aged 40 or under: 26.1 vs 18.6 percent triple-negative; five-year survival 71.1 vs 82.4 percent with equal chemotherapy use.
14.6 percent of 1,824 unselected triple-negative patients carry a predisposition mutation, 11.2 percent in BRCA1 or BRCA2 (Couch, JCO); the same year Burstein's basal-like immunosuppressed and immune-activated subtypes split basal-like disease by immune state.
Lehmann refines the subtypes to four (BL1 35%, BL2 22%, M 25%, LAR 16%) with pCR 41% versus 18% versus 29%; Telli sets HRD score 42 in neoadjuvant platinum trials.
Grade, ER, PR and HER2 enter the stage group alongside TNM (Giuliano, CA); validated in 2018.
910 patients; five-year overall survival 89.2 vs 83.6 percent, and 78.8 vs 70.3 percent in the triple-negative group. The first post-neoadjuvant treatment.
IMpassion130: atezolizumab + nab-paclitaxel improves PFS in PD-L1+ metastatic TNBC (approval later withdrawn).
OlympiAD and EMBRACA lead to olaparib and talazoparib approvals.
In 376 advanced patients carboplatin doubled the response rate in germline BRCA carriers while the Myriad HRD score and BRCA1 methylation predicted nothing; Bareche maps mutations onto the Lehmann subtypes in 550 tumours.
Medullary carcinoma becomes a pattern of invasive carcinoma of no special type; metaplastic, adenoid cystic, apocrine and secretory carcinomas keep their special-type status.
SCAN-B whole-genome sequencing puts HRDetect-high at 59% of TNBC (Nat Med); Loi's pooled 2,148 patients fix TILs as the strongest early prognostic marker.
ASCENT: OS 12.1 vs 6.7 months in pretreated disease; first ADC for TNBC.
KEYNOTE-355 in CPS ≥10 disease.
ER 1 to 10 percent is reported separately because endocrine benefit is uncertain; cohorts show these tumours behave like triple-negative disease.
BRE12-158's preplanned analysis of 196 residual-disease patients: distant relapse hazard ratio 2.99 and death hazard ratio 4.16 when ctDNA is detected after chemotherapy.
Neoadjuvant/adjuvant pembrolizumab approved for stage II-III TNBC; OS benefit confirmed 2024.
One year of olaparib after standard therapy improves iDFS and OS in gBRCA carriers.
Rugo and colleagues on 614 IMpassion130 tumours: SP142, SP263 and 22C3 positive in 46, 75 and 73 percent, concordance 69 percent. Atezolizumab's US breast indication withdrawn the same year.
Schettini (3,689 HER2-negative cancers, 36.6% of triple-negative) and Denkert (34.0% of 1,162 hormone receptor-negative trial patients) fix the share a year before DESTINY-Breast04 gave it a drug.
DESTINY-Breast04 includes TNBC patients with HER2-low tumours.
Martini's RNA sequencing of African American, West and East African tumours finds 613 ancestry-associated genes and distinct tumour-associated immune profiles.
UK trial, 161 women under surveillance; 27 percent ctDNA-positive by a year, 72 percent of them already metastatic on staging; none of five given pembrolizumab cleared.
Stecklein's 80-patient registry: ctDNA positive in a third of residual-disease patients, rising with RCB class, with three-year event-free survival 48% against 82%.
Leon-Ferre and colleagues, 1,966 untreated patients: five-year distant recurrence-free survival 94 percent with lymphocytes of 50 percent or more vs 78 percent below 30 percent.
ASCO-SSO recommends BRCA1/2 testing for all breast cancer diagnosed at 65 or under and for every PARP inhibitor candidate.
ASCENT-03, ASCENT-04, and TROPION-Breast02 all positive; TROPION-Breast02 shows OS benefit.
Iza-bren phase 3 positive (Feb 2026); FDA approves Dato-DXd and sacituzumab govitecan first line (Q2 2026).
Datopotamab deruxtecan first line: overall survival 23.7 vs 18.7 months. Olaparib: six-year survival 87.5 vs 83.2 percent, no excess leukaemia. Capivasertib plus paclitaxel: no survival gain.
Boissiere-Michot reclassifies 367 untreated TNBCs as 38% null, 38% ultralow and 24% low, none prognostic; ultralow stays unlabelled in TNBC.