Background Eribulin is a chemotherapy agent approved for metastatic breast cancer treatment after at least one regimen including an anthracycline and a taxane.

There is no standard treatment for heavily pretreated patients but there are other available options, such as capecitabine,  vinorelbine and gemcitabine. Eribulin is the only one which has significantly increased overall survival (OS).

Purpose To evaluate the safety and efficacy of eribulin in a third level hospital.

Material and methods An observational retrospective study was done with the archives of patients treated with eribulin from August 2012 to August 2015. We collected age, oestrogen and HER-2 receptor status, sites of metastasis, tolerance to eribulin, lines and cycles of treatment, progression free survival (PFS) and OS of 25 patients.

Results Median age was 59 years (range 33–81). 84% were oestrogen receptor positive, 8% HER-2 positive and 12% triple negative.

Median lines of treatment was 4 (range 3–8), and median number of cycles received was 4 (range 2–13).

Only 32% could tolerate the full dosage; 52% had 80% dose reduction and 16% had 60% does reduction due to side effects, the most common being fatigue (72%) and neutrophenia (24%, 4 patients suffered from grades 3–4).

72% of patients had taken capecitabine before, 56% gemcitabine and 36% vinorelbine.

At the time of the report only 2 patients were still in treatment with a follow-up of 7.9 and 1.7 months. Median PFS was 2.6 months (0.3–10.3) and the OS of the 15 patients who had died was 7.7 months (0.7–16.7).

Conclusion In our case, PFS and OS were lower than in the clinical trial EMBRACE: 3.6 and 13.2 months, respectively. The reason could be that our patients received more lines of treatment before eribulin compared with the trial (maximum 5), and our sample size was smaller.

Choice of suitable treatment should be adapted to each patient regarding their quality of life. Because of its easy administration and manageable toxicity, eribulin is a good option in sequential monotherapy, but with regard to cost effectiveness, capecitabine should be consider first, according to published studies.

No conflict of interest.