New Drug Extends Lives in Some Terminal Breast Cancer Cases
In the first success of an entirely new approach to fighting cancer, scientists have shown they can lengthen the lives of some terminally ill breast cancer patients with a medicine that thwarts the defective genes causing the disease.
Attacking cancer at its genetic roots has been a goal of science for two decades, but researchers said Sunday that this is firm evidence at last that they can actually do this.
Experts predict that the new drug, called Herceptin, will come on the market next fall and could quickly become a standard treatment for the one-quarter or more of breast cancer patients whose tumors are driven by multiple copies of a gene called HER-2.
Herceptin substantially boosts the power of ordinary chemotherapy and carries none of the usual cancer drug side effects, such as nausea and hair loss.
But perhaps even more important, doctors say, is that this treatment works at all, since it shows that one of the hottest areas of cancer research is likely to pay off.
“This proves the paradigm. If we understand what is broken in the malignant cell, we may be able to fix it,” UCLA’s Dr. Dennis Slamon said.
Dozens of other drugs in earlier stages of development are aimed at sidestepping a variety of genetic flaws that make tumors grow uncontrollably, and several of these could be available in a few years.
“This is not the end of the story; it is the beginning of the story,” said Dr. Allen S. Lichter of the University of Michigan, the incoming president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Results of the first large studies of Herceptin were presented Sunday in Los Angeles at the society’s annual scientific meeting, attended by about 18,000 cancer specialists.
Doctors tested it on women with invariably fatal advanced breast cancer that had spread to other parts of their bodies. When added to standard treatment, they found it lengthened their lives an average of three months. Though this may seem modest, researchers said it represents a major impact in such a late stage of the disease.
Researchers are unsure of the treatment’s ultimate impact on survival, but a few cases suggest that it could be substantial in those with the HER-2 defect. Typically, such women die within 10 to 18 months after the cancer spreads; however, one of the earliest patients to get Herceptin is still alive after almost six years, and another woman has survived nearly four years.
