Breast Cancer Cure: Combination of Drugs Offers Promising Results in Disease Treatment
Researchers have learned that a combination of two different immunotherapy drugs for treating triple-negative breast cancers in women shows promising results.
Breast cancers are called triple-negative when the offending tumor is progesterone receptor-negative, HER2-negative and estrogen receptor-negative. Although it is usually responsive to chemotherapy, the said type is also particularly difficult to treat. Survival rates are low and the cancer often becomes resistant to chemotherapy.
A research published in the journal Science Translational Medicine revealed that scientists have discovered a possible treatment for triple-negative breast cancer. Experts combined two immunotherapies — anti-PD1 and anti-CTLA4 — and tested the product on rodent models of breast cancer. The study showed that a combination of the two immunotherapies and the popular chemotherapy known as cisplatin resulted in increased survival rates and faster tumor regression.
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Meanwhile, a clinical trial from Roche Holding AG has also shown promising results for breast cancer treatment. Researchers combined the company's newer breast cancer drug with an older treatment, and the trial offered a modest benefit for women diagnosed with early breast cancer.
Almost 5,000 women were selected to be part of the clinical trial. After having surgery to remove their tumors, female individuals with early HER2-positive breast cancer were treated with either Roche's Herceptin and one placebo, or chemotherapy plus one year of standard treatment with Herceptin and Perjeta, the new cancer drug.
The researchers said that after three years of treatment, 93.2 percent of the subjects on Herceptin alone did not develop invasive breast cancer in comparison with the 94.1 percent of the women that received Perjeta. It was also noted that Perjeta did not make any difference for patients whose cancer had not reached the lymph nodes.
"For those patients who do have a worse anatomic prognosis, the combination is probably better than the single agent," Dr. Bruce Johnson, chief clinical research officer at Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the American Society of Clinical Oncology's (ASCO) incoming president (via Reuters).
