NEWS & INFO
Blog & In the News
We track notable coverage of QLHC's trials, science, and people — and summarize it here so you can stay informed without leaving the site. Each post links to the original source for the full read.
We track notable coverage of QLHC's trials, science, and people — and summarize it here so you can stay informed without leaving the site. Each post links to the original source for the full read.
TIME Magazine has named Dr. Laura Esserman, founder and principal investigator of the I-SPY trials and RECAST DCIS, to its TIME100 Health list for 2026 — recognizing her decade-long push to personalize breast cancer screening and treatment. The recognition follows results from the WISDOM study showing that risk-based screening is both safe and effective. This is the second time Dr. Esserman has appeared on a TIME 100 list, having been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2016 alongside Duke's Dr. Shelley Hwang for their shared work challenging overtreatment of DCIS.
Targeted Oncology included I-SPY 2.2 in its annual roundup of the most significant advances in breast oncology, highlighting how the trial's subtype-driven approach — combining antibody-drug conjugates and checkpoint inhibitors — produced meaningful improvements for patients with early-stage disease.
Results published in Nature Medicine show the antibody-drug conjugate Dato-DXd combined with durvalumab produced high pathologic complete response rates in immune-positive and triple-negative subtypes — with the trial's SMART design enabling real-time treatment tailoring based on tumor biology.
Targeted Oncology spoke with Dr. Rebecca Shatsky about ASCO 2024 results. For the immune-positive subtype, the estimated complete response rate with Dato-DXd and durvalumab reached 65% — without standard chemotherapy — demonstrating the trial's potential to de-escalate treatment for the right patients.
I-SPY 2 findings show that longitudinally collected ctDNA can meaningfully refine risk stratification in patients who don't achieve complete response after neoadjuvant therapy — supporting ctDNA as a tool for guiding post-surgical treatment decisions.
Using multi-omic data from nearly 1,000 patients across 10 trial arms, I-SPY 2 researchers developed a new response-predictive subtyping framework incorporating immune, DNA repair, luminal, and HER2 phenotypes — now being tested in I-SPY 2.2. The dataset has been made publicly available.
OncLive spoke with Dr. Rita Nanda about the I-SPY 2 trial's adaptive platform model, patient selection by molecular subtype, and why its efficiency in identifying promising agents makes it a model for future oncology drug development.
CBS San Francisco profiled QLHC's RECAST DCIS trial, testing whether active surveillance and hormone therapy can replace surgery and radiation for DCIS — a diagnosis that accounts for 20–25% of all breast cancers and that researchers believe may often not require aggressive intervention.
The ASCO Post examines the scientific rationale behind treating DCIS as a prevention opportunity rather than a cancer requiring immediate surgery — covering the RECAST trial and the growing movement toward active surveillance as a standard option.
A landmark New York Times profile of Dr. Laura Esserman traces her career-long effort to upend conventional breast cancer medicine — from early skepticism of radical mastectomy to leadership of the I-SPY trials and pioneering work questioning aggressive DCIS treatment.
Send links or suggestions to info@qlhc.org and we'll review for inclusion. A media package for journalists and industry publications is also in development.
