Abstract Treatment approach for nonmetastatic triple-negative breast cancer consists of neoadjuvant therapy (NACT) followed by surgery. Sequential anthracyclines and taxanes were the major backbone of therapy until the advent of carboplatin, which helped improve the pathological complete response (pCR) as well as survival rates. In this study, carboplatin is administered on a 3-weekly basis along with the backbone therapy, and the pCR rates is assessed. To assess the pCR rates in patients in whom 3-weekly carboplatin was added to the sequential taxane–anthracycline chemotherapy versus the routinely used anthracycline–taxane chemotherapy as neoadjuvant in patients with nonmetastatic triple-negative breast cancer. This is a nonrandomized study with historical controls, which included a total of 72 patients, 36 in the study arm and 36 in the control arm. The participants in the historical arm were selected from the list of patients from the records who were initially treated in this institute using simple random sampling. The patients in the intervention arm were selected by consecutive sampling from the eligible patients attending the medical oncology outpatient department. AC followed by paclitaxel was the administered regimen in the control arm, which initially was our institutional policy. In the study arm, carboplatin is added to the regimen and administered every 3 weeks. After NACT and surgery, the study arm (platinum-containing arm) had higher pCR rates (n = 18, 50%) when compared with the control arm (n = 6, 16.6%). Between the two arms, the difference is 33.4% (p-value = 0.003). The study arm also had higher breast pCR compared with the control arm, which was statistically significant (p = 0.004). Although even the nodal pCR was high in the study arm, it did not reach statistical significance. Adverse events were monitored and were manageable between both the arms. In stage II–III triple-negative breast cancer patients, adding carboplatin to the taxanes on a 3-weekly basis yields higher pCR rates compared with non-addition of platinum with a manageable toxicity profile.
Ambalavana et al. (Wed,) studied this question.