• A pooled analysis of 7 randomized trials with 6,377 patients with primary BC receiving neoadjuvant anthracycline and taxane-containing CT.
• pCR has varying definitions but correlates with extended DFS mainly in HER2-positive nonluminal and triple-negative tumors.

For a country that is slightly smaller than the state of Montana, Germany has made profound contributions to cancer research, for example, establishing bendamustine/rituximab as the favored induction treatment for indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In this landmark JCO treatise their leadership role in the neoadjuvant systemic treatment of breast cancer is on full display. While the paper will mainly interest investigators, it does provide one fascinating and clinically relevant observation that is important for clinicians to consider, namely that the prognostic impact of pathologic complete response (which seems to have as many definitions as there are cooperative groups) varies greatly among specific tumor subsets. Specifically, the paper suggests that patients with triple-negative tumors who achieve pCRs have substantially improved outcomes compared to patients with pCRs in other subsets.