Cardiac Monitoring During Clinical Trials

peer reviewedThe prognosis of breast cancer has greatly improved over time, particularly through the development of targeted therapy. Close cardiac monitoring during clinical trials investigating anticancer therapeutics is a field in cardiology that emerged 15 years ago. Indeed, anticancer agent-related cardiac dysfunction has been a nonanticipated adverse event in a phase 3 trial testing trastuzumab for metastatic breast cancer that overexpresses HER2. We propose hereby a description of the different strategies worked out to prevent cardiac dysfunction attributable to trastuzumab when it was evaluated in the adjuvant setting. This approach is still the fact of the studies designed since that and now, as a panel of cardiac toxicity has been associated with the development of these targeted therapies. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved