There is no medicine to cure breast cancer as advanced as Elise Winters, their tumors have spread around your body. But Winters, diagnosed in 2002, said he is grateful for a number of experimental therapies have prolonged his life, although some drugs have only worked for a year or two
“I was the recipient of a cutting-edge research,” said Winters, 64, an artist from New Jersey. “I will be lucky enough to receive the next thing to come.”
This is why winter is encouraged by the results of two new studies presented today at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. She did not attend, but she knows how desperately women with advanced breast cancer need more options. About 41,000 American women die from the disease each year. Both drugs are under the control of tumors of the month as the standard treatments is research.
One drug, pertuzumab, success is based on historical Herceptin drug, which targets 25% of breast tumors that winter, the overproduction of a protein called HER2. Winters claims Herceptin helped him survive that long.
However, some women with early cancer, and all of them with advanced tumors eventually relapse despite Herceptin.
In the new study, the pertuzumab in patients with recurrence than six months later. When combined with standard chemotherapy and Herceptin, pertuzumab women remained in remission of 18.5 months vs. 12.4 months with Herceptin and chemotherapy alone, according to the study, published online Wednesday in New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers do not know if pertuzumab will help other women, but I noticed a trend at the beginning of this address.
“It’s very positive,” says researcher José Baselga, chief of hematology and oncology at the Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s very rare that this level of improvement.”
The pharmaceutical company Genentech applies for approval by the Food and Drug Administration for pertuzumab Tuesday.
Both Herceptin and pertuzumab are artificial antibodies that block growth signals produced by the protein HER2, Baselga said. Each block of the growth of a slightly different way, creating two types of obstacles to overcome cancer.
A third drug, Tykerb, GlaxoSmithKline, the objective of HER2 otherwise. Patients with metastases sometimes take other drugs Tykerb and Herceptin after chemotherapy stops working, or you can combine the two, says an accompanying editorial in the New England Journal. Note that the researchers are developing a small army of medicines for patients whose tumors are HER2 over-production.
Winters started taking a TDM1 March. His cancer had spread enough to feel small tumors break the neck. A few months later they were gone.
As a cocktail of drugs have revolutionized the treatment of AIDS, through its transformation into a chronic, Baselga said the combination therapy is likely to be the best hope to keep the cancer under control, too.
However, the combination of up to two of these drugs is very expensive, says Eric Winer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who was not involved in the new study. Advanced Cancer Treatment with Herceptin generally costs $ 30 000, said Genentech. Winer The cost has not been announced for pertuzumab, but predicted it is likely that the “cost at least that.”
Baselga and acknowledges that the early success of this type are not always.The FDA recently revoked the approval of Avastin for breast cancer, which was originally approved by its ability to prolong remission in women with advanced disease. Subsequent studies showed Avastin did not improve overall survival, but the increase in serious side effects.
However, Baselga, said that combining pertuzumab with Herceptin may be attractive to many women, because it caused serious side effects are relatively rare compared with traditional chemotherapy. Women who took pertuzumab had no heart problems that were a concern with Herceptin, says the study, although they were more likely to have diarrhea and a condition in which patients fever and a decrease in white blood cells.
“I can not imagine the problem seriously, but the combined treatment of cancer,” said Baselga. “If we believe that blocking a single channel, we will remove the cancer, we are wrong.”
The researchers also described promising results with another drug, Afinitor, which contributed to the fight against cancer in women with the most common type of breast cancer – those whose growth is fueled by estrogen, which makes about two thirds of breast tumors.
Patients with metastatic disease Afinitor in combination with another drug commonly used in advanced breast cancer, called aromatase inhibitor Aromasin, remained in remission for 7.4 months, according to a study of 724 postmenopausal women, also published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In comparison, women who received placebo remained in remission and Aromasin 3.2 months, the study said.
This is a significant improvement, since women in the study had tumors that were increasingly difficult resumed after treatment with a variety of other therapies, Baselga, who also directed the study.
Based on these results, and Aromasin Afinitor should become the new standard of care for these patients, said study co-author Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, in a press release.
Other doctors are not so sure.
However, note that several months of remission Winer come at high cost: 23% of people with Afinitor experienced a serious adverse reaction, compared with 12% of those taking Aromasin alone. Side effects such as mouth ulcers, fatigue levels and levels of blood sugar, are “much more, like chemotherapy,” says Winer. “It will be very important in this case to see if there is a survival advantage” over time, doctors continue to monitor patients.
However, the cancer surgeon Susan Love says that scientific innovation Afinitor.
This is because all women in the study was not an important treatment option. Their tumors had become “resistant” to drugs called aromatase inhibitors, designed to starve tumors of the breast, depriving them of estrogen. Afinitor seem to allow aromatase inhibitor Aromasin that women were not taken before, to resume the blockade of their cancer, Baselga said.
Source: http://www.latestcnnnews.com/researchers-claims-to-devise-new-drugs-combination-to-cure-breast-cancer-with-sufficient-results.html
