A new treatment nearly halves the risk of disease progression or death from a less common form of breast cancer that hasn’t seen major drug advances in over a decade, researchers reported Monday.
Results from the study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, are expected to be submitted to regulators and could soon establish a new first-line therapy for people with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer — the advanced stage of a form that comprises 15–20 percent of all breast cancer cases.
HER2-positive cancers are fueled by an overactive HER2 gene, which makes too much of a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 that helps cancer cells grow and spread.
Patients with HER2-positive breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body live around five years.
“Seeing such a striking improvement was really impressive to us — we were taking a standard and almost doubling how long patients could have their cancer controlled for,” oncologist Sara Tolaney, chief of the breast oncology division at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told AFP. (CTVnews)