Pertuzumab drug for early breast cancer licensed

About 15 per cent of women with early-stage breast cancer have HER2 positive cancer. About 16 percent of the women scored low on the test and thus, received only anti-hormone therapy, no chemotherapy. But, still they ask those women to undergo chemo as there are no great ways to tell who can safely skip it.

Professor David Miles, Consultant Medical Oncologist, lead the study. Dr. West – who founded The West Clinic in 1979 when he opened a two-room, three-physician cancer clinic in Downtown Memphis – was there, and as he spoke, he emphasized the role of hope in cancer treatment, saying hope “comes from research”.

These findings could help doctors identify patients at high-risk of a recurrence and allow them to *target* the genes responsible.

The trial was supported by the National Cancer Institute.

NHS England announced earlier this month that the drug is in danger of being axed from the CDF come November, which means new applications for treatment will not be considered from this point if cost negotiations with Roche are unsuccessful.

Doster said another test, the Breast Cancer Index, is also available now to help predict which women would benefit from taking hormone blockers longer. Each year, more than 100,000 women in the United States alone are diagnosed with this.

Traditionally, breast cancer patients, after going through surgery to remove a cancerous tumor, would then go through chemotherapy treatments to help kill any stray cancer cells that might cause the cancer to recur.

Doctors at The Christie have hailed the “important” advance in treating HER2-positive breast cancer, which tends to spread far more quickly than other types.

Note that the study confirms expert-based clinical guidelines that recommend that the risk score should be used to risk stratify patients and assign adjuvant chemotherapy, and supports the clinical utility of the 21-gene assay in this setting.

The test measures the activity of genes that control cell growth, and others that indicate a likely response to hormone therapy treatment.

Past studies have looked at how women classified as low, intermediate or high risk by the test have fared.

‘Even though they did not get chemotherapy this large group of women did very well.

Speaking after the initial trials, Dr Duncan Wheatley from the RCHT said: “These results are unprecedented”. The risk of metastatic recurrence was less than 1%, and 98% of the women remained alive at 5 years.

Hayes and his colleagues are now testing to see which of these patients benefit from chemotherapy. The more we learned, the more finesse [we gained], we understood about the biology, which is really the key to breast cancer treatment.

“It’s important that the test was validated, but also how low the risk of recurrence actually was for this subset of patients”, she says.

A previous study published in June 2015 showed that results from the 21-multigene test simultaneously impact treatment decisions by physicians and patients.

“I think the combination of the drugs and the chemotherapy and having it before my surgery have given me the best chance of staying cancer free”.