Discoveries
New two-drug combination found to target tumors in women with advanced breast cancer
Hal Burstein, MD, PhD
A combination of two drugs — one a recent addition to the anticancer arsenal, the other a mainstay chemotherapy agent — can have a substantial impact on tumors in women with advanced breast cancer while causing few side effects, according to a study by Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers.
The drugs studied were Herceptin, a commercially produced version of an antibody made naturally by the body, and Navelbine, a standard chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Both were taken weekly by a group of 40 women whose breast tumors produce an overabundance of a protein called HER2. Such "HER2-positive" tumors are found in an estimated 20 to 30 percent of women with breast cancer.
Researchers discovered the two drugs led to dramatic tumor shrinkage in 30 of the patients — three-quarters of the entire group. "Among women who had not previously been treated with chemotherapy for metastatic [spreading] breast cancer, 84 percent had a significant tumor response," said the study's lead author, Harold Burstein, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber's Breast Oncology Center.
"Perhaps more impressive, however, was the high rate of response — more than two-thirds — among women who had previously been treated with various kinds of chemotherapy," he adds. "This combination was very well tolerated by our patients, without many of the traditional complications of chemotherapy."
The study, whose senior author was Eric Winer, MD, director of the Breast Oncology Center, was published in the May 15 Journal of Clinical Oncology.