Treatment of breast cancer: dealing with toxicity

Two of the major challenges in breast cancer research are to increase efficacy of anticancer treatments without increasing clinical relevant toxicity and/or to decrease toxicity of anticancer treatment without decreasing its efficacy.
To achieve this, improved insight into the mechanisms underlying treatment-induced toxicity is crucial.

This thesis describes studies in which it is aimed to optimize therapy for patients with breast cancer in various stages of the disease. This might be reached by dealing with toxicity in several ways:
(1) decreasing toxicity, while maintaining efficacy,
(2) increasing efficacy, without increasing clinical relevant toxicity,
(3) increasing efficacy by toxicity-based dose escalation and
(4) prevention of (complications of ) toxicity of anticancer treatments.