Huge News:
Herceptin ‘Simply Stunning’ For Breast Cancer
Jeremy Laurance
in London
Oct. 20. — In the sober world of medical journals, the choice of language is unprecedented. The first trials of the breast cancer drug, Herceptin, in women with early stage disease are “simply stunning,” the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) says today.
They reveal “a dramatic and perhaps permanent perturbation in the natural history of the disease, maybe even a cure.” The results are, it concludes, “revolutionary, not evolutionary” adding: “Our care of patients with HER II positive breast cancer must change today.”
Medical journals rarely speak of a cure for cancer. Women treated with Herceptin had a 46 per cent reduced risk of their breast cancer returning. The drug works on patients sensitive to the protein HER II, who number 8,000 to 10,000 in the UK, 20 to 25 per cent of those newly diagnosed with the disease.
The headline results were presented at a conference in Orlando, Florida, last May, when US specialists gave the researchers a standing ovation, and are published in full for the first time today. No drug, not even tamoxifen the gold standard in breast cancer for over 30 years, has shown such a significant reduction in risk in so short a time (one to two and a half years), the journal says.
Breast cancer charities were exultant yesterday. Dr Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of Breakthrouugh Breast Cancer said: “This is one of the biggest breakthroughs in breast cancer treatment. It is vital that this drug, which is set to save around 1000 women’s lives a year, is made available on the NHS without delay.”
The results helped boost sales for Roche, the Swiss based pharmaceutical company, which reported third quarter profits up 20 per cent yesterday. Roche also makes Tamiflu, the drug being stockpiled by countries around the globe as a defence against the threatened pandemic of avian flu.
The research on Herceptin triggered a worldwide demand for the drug even before it was licensed for early breast cancer (it is currently licensed only for advanced breast cancer that has spread to other organs). The trials reported in the NEJM involved 3,000 women in the US and 5,000 women in 39 other countries who were randomly allocated to treatment with Herceptin following chemotherapy.
The discovery that Herceptin only works in certain women demonstrates that breast cancer is not one but several diseases and marks a new era in cancer research. Instead of screening thousands of compounds to find one that works — the traditional mode of drug discovery — scientists are now designing drugs to target specific receptors identified as playing a role in cancer at the molecular level.
