Drug could help cut breast cancer deaths

Breast cancer patients who take the drug docetaxel instead of the older medicine fluorouracil cut their risk of death by 30%, a new study has found.

Among the women who received the Sanofi-Aventis drug docetaxel, said study author John Mackey of the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, Canada, “there’s no group of patients that didn’t benefit, so you can’t pick out someone who’s not a winner from the new treatment.”

The benefit of the docetaxel combination “was so large and so striking, it’s turned a lot of heads. It’s a high-water mark for chemotherapy,” Mackey told Reuters.

The study, published in the June 2 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 1,491 women across 20 countries whose tumors had spread to at least one lymph node.

Each drug was used in combination with two other commonly used anti-cancer medicines, doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide.

The docetaxel treatment, which is already the standard of care in many cancer centers, reduced the risk of death after five years by 30%, bringing the survival rate up to 87%, compared with 81% for patients using fluorouracil.

Docetaxel also reduced the recurrence of cancer. Of the patients put on docetaxel, 25% had their breast tumors reappear after five years, compared with 32% of those using fluorouracil.