A new treatment for patients with advanced breast cancer extends their lives for almost 16 months. The cocktail consists of two "magic bullet" drugs plus standard chemotherapy, according to NBC News. The combo treats patients with difficult-to-treat HER-2 positive breast cancer that's often tantamount to a death sentence.
"I can't think of something that improves survival by this much," Dr. Jennifer Keating Litton of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, told NBC News. "Often, we debate over changing practice for something that extends survival by a few months, so 15.7 months that is so impressive. And really that's exactly what I see in the clinic.
Dr. Litton, who was not involved in the trial, said the three-drug combo was becoming the standard of care even in women whose cancers were in early stages.
The combination includes two drugs called monoclonal antibodies that latch onto tumor cells and are meant to be prescribed together. One of the drugs is Herceptin, which was originally intended to fight HER-2 breast tumors. The second monoclonal antibody is called pertuzumab, and it was created to work with Herceptin. The third drug in the cocktail is a standard chemotherapy drug called docetaxel.
In a study of about 800 patients with breast cancers which had spread, patients on the drug cocktail lived about 16 months longer than those given either Herceptin or docetaxel alone.
"We've never seen results like this before in HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer," said Dr. Sandra Swain of MedStar Washington Hospital Center, who led the trial. "This unprecedented data gives patients with an aggressive disease hope to live a longer, better life," she told NBC News.
A trial is on-going to see if the combination is effective in women whose cancers have not spread. "It is our hope it would actually cure patients in that setting," Swain said.
To read the entire NBC News story, go here.
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