Patients with pretreated estrogen receptor (ER)-positive/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced breast cancer have poor prognosis. Elacestrant is a novel, oral selective ER degrader that demonstrated activity in early studies.

This randomized, open-label, phase III trial enrolled patients with ER-positive/HER2-negative advanced breast cancer who had one-two lines of endocrine therapy, required pretreatment with a cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitor, and ≤ 1 chemotherapy. Patients were randomly assigned to elacestrant 400 mg orally once daily or standard-of-care (SOC) endocrine monotherapy. Primary end points were progression-free survival (PFS) by blinded independent central review in all patients and patients with detectable mutations.

Patients were randomly assigned to elacestrant (n = 239) or SOC (n = 238). mutation was detected in 47.8% of patients, and 43.4% received two prior endocrine therapies. PFS was prolonged in all patients (hazard ratio = 0.70; 95% CI, 0.55 to 0.88; = .002) and patients with mutation (hazard ratio = 0.55; 95% CI, 0.39 to 0.77; = .0005). Treatment-related grade 3/4 adverse events occurred in 7.2% receiving elacestrant and 3.1% receiving SOC. Treatment-related adverse events leading to treatment discontinuations were 3.4% in the elacestrant arm versus 0.9% in SOC. Nausea of any grade occurred in 35.0% receiving elacestrant and 18.8% receiving SOC (grade 3/4, 2.5% and 0.9%, respectively).

Elacestrant is the first oral selective ER degrader demonstrating a significant PFS improvement versus SOC both in the overall population and in patients with mutations with manageable safety in a phase III trial for patients with ER-positive/HER2-negative advanced breast cancer.