Dealing with Adverse Events Associated with Sacituzumab Govitecan

Dr. Sara M. Tolaney: I'd love for you to kind of tell because your experience it hasn't been an easy drug for you. And so I think it's good for people to kind of understand how people tolerate some of these drugs. It's a it's an antibody drug conjugate it's made to try to limit some of these chemo toxicities. But you know, in truth, it does have chemo side effects and obviously losing hair but but also diarrhea and lowering of blood counts. And so maybe you can tell us a little bit about how your experience has been on the drug. It is indescribable.

Valerie Frank: The diarrhea situation that is involved with sacituzumab. And I had one week where I was incredibly, incredibly, incredibly devastated with diarrhea, none of the drugs that I was given for diarrhea prevention were working. And my husband was unable to help me because he was he was tied up with something and my daughter — my 19-year-old daughter — had to take me in to get IV fluids twice in a week. And I tried to keep my kids out of my cancer things, I don't like them to have to come to the hospital, that time will come but it's not yet. And I had my 19-year-old taking care of me and bringing me you know, liquid IV and supplements and I had diarrhea is three times today. It's just the diarrhea is crazy. It's insane. It's a lot.

Dr. Sara M. Tolaney: I will say that, you know, maybe I didn't, I didn't advertise it as it as such, because I will say on average, patients tend to have kind of low-grade intermittent diarrhea, in which case we can use a little bit of anti diarrheal medicine as needed. But you know, Valerie had a very different reaction than, than I typically see where she's actually had as she's describing a lot of diarrhea. And despite using a lot of anti diarrheal medications, and different ones, you know, it's been a bit of a challenge for her. And I think, you know, it goes to show when getting treatment, everyone tolerates drugs very differently. And I think it's important to realize that some people can have diarrhea, I've had people be constipated. And then I've had people have kind of intermittent stuff. But Valerie's really had pretty significant diarrhea again, you know, different than the average person with this drug. But again, you know, it goes to show that it does sometimes take managing things differently. And it was different people and needing to come in for fluids has a huge impact on your day to day life running to the bathroom all the time taking anti diarrheal medicines.

Valerie Frank: I'm getting better at fighting it, I'm getting better at it. Now I am incredibly aggressive when it when it happens, which is you know, but I'm always fighting it, I'm always in a state of either it being under control for now or about to be out of control. And then and it's like a huge part of my daily life is is is fighting it and partly because I don't want a dose reduction because I actually think this assay will find out because I have three scans today. But I think that this assay is doing really good job on the cancer because prior to starting it I had hideous bone pain and I was using a cane I had a pain in my leg. I had pain in my hip. I painted my skull where I have a large bone met and it's all gone. So I think that this I'm expecting these scans to be amazing, great scans. And I don't want a dose reduction. So I'm going to fight the I need to call it dysentery because diarrhea doesn't describe it.