There are no drugs to cure
That's why Winters is encouraged by results of two new studies, being presented today at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. She wasn't involved in either, but she knows how desperately women with advanced breast cancer need more options. Nearly 41,000 U.S. women die of the disease a year. Both drugs keep tumors in check months longer than standard therapies, the research finds.
One drug, pertuzumab, builds on the success of the drug Herceptin, which targets the 25% of breast tumors like Winters', which overproduce a protein called HER2.
When combined with Herceptin and standard chemotherapy, pertuzumab kept women in remission for 18.5 months, compared with 12.4 months with Herceptin and chemo alone, says the study, published online Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers don't yet know whether pertuzumab will help women longer, but they've noticed an early trend in this direction.
'Hugely positive' development
"This is hugely positive," says lead researcher Jos Baselga, chief of hematology and oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. "It is very uncommon to have this level of improvement."
Drugmaker Genentech applied for Food and Drug Administration approval for pertuzumab Tuesday.
Yet combining these drugs will be incredibly expensive, says Eric Winer of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who wasn't involved in the new study. Treating advanced cancer with Herceptin typically costs $30,000.
The cost hasn't been announced for pertuzumab, but it's likely to "cost at least that much," Winer predicts.
Baselga acknowledges that early successes such as this don't always pan out. The FDA recently revoked its approval of Avastin for breast cancer after studies failed to confirm its early promise. Still, Baselga notes that a Herceptin-pertuzumab combination could be attractive to many women because it caused relatively few serious side effects compared with traditional chemo.
Good results with Afinitor, too
Researchers also described promising results with another drug, Afinitor, which helped control cancer in women with the most common type of breast cancer -- those whose growth is fueled by estrogen, which drives about two-thirds of breast tumors.
Metastatic patients who combined Afinitor with another drug commonly used in advanced breast cancer, an aromatase inhibitor called Aromasin, stayed in remission for 7.4 months, says a study of 724 postmenopausal patients, also in The New England Journal of Medicine. By comparison, women given Aromasin and a placebo stayed in remission 3.2 months, the study says.
Winer describes results as "encouraging news for women with breast cancer today, but not news to be oversold."
"It comes on the heels of years in which we had relatively little," he says.
"They provide us with some hope for future drug development."
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INSTRUCTIONS = A combination of twp drugs may keep tumors in check months longer than standard therapies, finds new research. breast cancer as advanced as Elise Winters'; her tumors have spread around her body. But Winters, first diagnosed in 2002, says she's grateful that a series of experimental therapies has prolonged her life, even if each worked only for a year or two. "I've been the beneficiary of cutting-edge research," says Winters, 64, an artist from New Jersey. "Maybe I'll be lucky enough to benefit from the next thing to come along."
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