Surgery to remove the primary tumor in women diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer, followed by the standard combination of therapies, adds months to the patients’ lives, compared with standard therapy alone, an worldwide clinical trial led by a University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) professor revealed.
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Professor Corinne Faivre-Finn, trial lead and Cancer Research UK-funded scientist from the University of Manchester and the Christie, said: “Before this study it was unclear whether having radiotherapy once or twice a day helped more patients survive for longer and what level of side effects was expected with modern radiotherapy techniques”. The share price has swung wildly this year, as they began plunging late in February after the company first announced unfavorable clinical trial results, before rallying in the lead-up to the ASCO presentation.
Huge numbers of women in the United Kingdom and around the world are already taking hormone therapy – drugs that block oestrogen in the body that can fuel breast cancer growth.
The first study sheds light on the complex interaction between underlying metabolic risk and breast cancer.
‘This will markedly reduce fatal recurrences and recurrences in general in breast cancer patients’.
But some experts noted that the women who took the drug an extra five years did not live longer on the whole than those in the control group.
Claudine Isaacs, a medical oncologist at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre, said the data was long-awaited by clinicians who wondered whether prolonged treatment with aromatase inhibitors would be beneficial and safe for patients.
Dr Nick Turner, a breast cancer specialist from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said that it would be a big thing to bring changes in treatment for so many women.
But they cause unpleasant side effects in about half of all patients including hot flushes, sleeping difficulties and the bone thinning condition osteoporosis.
Research on more than 300 women with early-stage breast cancer reinforces earlier work which suggests diet may play an important role in cutting cancer risk.
Researchers found that tumours in patients who received targeted treatments had shrinkage rates of 30.6%, compared with 4.9% in those who did not.
The Metastatic Breast Cancer Project aims to address that gap, encouraging patients via social media and through advocacy groups to share tissue and saliva samples and clinical information. This treatment engineers a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack their own tumors.
Those women are at greater risk from oestrogen because their breast cells have more oestrogen receptors making them particularly sensitive to the hormone.
The study enrolled 1,918 postmenopausal women in the randomized Phase 3 trial.
It would be a significant move away from the “one size fits all approach” often used for treating cancer, and academics believe it will boost survival rates and prolong patients’ lifespans without the disease progressing.
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To calculate cost of care, the researchers analyzed claims from the MarketScan database of 14,643 adult women diagnosed with breast cancer between 2008 and 2012 in the U.S. To qualify for the study, women must have had full insurance coverage from six months prior to 18 months after diagnosis, received chemotherapy within three months of diagnosis, and had no secondary malignancy within one year of diagnosis. But, added Burstein, who wasn’t involved in the study, most of the women tolerated the extended treatment reasonably well.
