Beating the Odds

A new drug may help decrease breast cancer recurrence.

Breast cancer. It's the disease that women fear. And it's no wonder: more than 200,000 American women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year; nearly 40,000 die.

A new way of treating an aggressive type of breast cancer is changing those odds for the better. Results from two large clinical trials, published this spring, have the doctors involved using adjectives like "dramatic," "breakthrough," and "lifesaving."

Researchers found that the drug trastuzumab (brand name Herceptin), when given with chemotherapy, decreased the risk of cancer recurrence by 52 percent in patients at high risk for deadly cancer recurrence.

In this subset of patients, the tumor specimens were HER-2 positive. HER-2 is a growth-promoting protein that's found on the surface of cancer cells. HER-2 positive cancers grow more rapidly than other cancers and until now, they were difficult to treat. About one in three breast cancer patients is HER-2 positive.

When researchers determined that excess HER-2 was related to cancer recurrence, it gave them a target and a goal: Find a way to stop the fast-track growth of HER-2. That work began about 15 years ago. Researchers strove to develop a medication that would bind to HER-2 and stop the cancer. The result is trastuzumab, a laboratory-engineered protein that helps the body's immune system fight foreign invaders such as cancer.

"It's magnificent that this could be developed," says Edith Perez, M.D, an oncologist at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., and principal research investigator of one of the trials.

Research, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, Genentech and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, involved more than 3,000 patients treated at multiple cancer centers nationwide.

Beyond a doubt, it shows that using trastuzumab to treat HER-2 positive breast cancer patients significantly decreases recurrence and saves lives.

"This research dramatically changes what we can offer these patients," says Dr. Perez. "This is the biggest improvement we've seen in breast cancer care in 30 years, and perhaps ever, in the treatment of breast cancer."

If you or a loved one is diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, make sure the physician has the tumor tested for HER-2. The research is new and the test may not be standard at all medical facilities. Experienced labs need to do the test.