Researchers tested the effectiveness of the drug “trastuzumab deruxtecan” in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. The results are promising.
This is a discovery that might significantly improve the fight once morest breast cancer. In Spain, Doctor Javier Cortés, director of the Barcelona International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) has published the conclusions of the “most positive study in the history” of breast cancer.
This essay, which appeared in New England Journal of Medicine, tested the safety and efficacy of the drug “trastuzumab deruxtecan” in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. Objective ? To prove that this drug provides an answer in the fight once morest this particularly aggressive type of cancer, as reported The Independent. “We are convinced that trastuzumab deruxtecan can bring a profound change in the treatment of so-called HER2 positive breast and gastric cancers“, a genetic mutation producing a protein that boosts the proliferation of cancer cells, underlined the boss of the AstraZeneca group, Pascal Soriot.
What is it regarding ? This drug combines a targeted drug with another chemotherapy drug (deruxtecan). “Among patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer previously treated with trastuzumab and a taxane, the risk of disease progression or death was lower in those who received trastuzumab deruxtecan than in those who received trastuzumab emtansine“, summarizes the study.
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Second-line treatment
This study was conducted with 524 people. Among this panel, “the percentage of those who were alive without disease progression at 12 months was 75.8% with trastuzumab deruxtecan and 34.1% with trastuzumab emtansine (the standard treatment“, reports the New England Journal of Medicine. In addition, the percentage of patients alive at 12 months was 94.1% with trastuzumab deruxtecan and 85.9% with trastuzumab emtansine.
“This drug is so innovative and so improves prognosis compared to current standard treatment that we might be in the presence of the most active drug in the history of breast cancer.“, announced Dr. Cortés. According to him, he might “cure the disease in some patients, because the tumor disappears in 16% of cases“.
Thus, the results obtained with this drug have been “so positive“that trastuzumab deruxtecan is now emerging as the new standard of second-line treatment for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.
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