Hope for Metastatic Breast Cancer
Reported November 28, 2005
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — A new, investigational drug shows encouraging results in treating women with metastatic breast cancer. According to a study published in Core Evidence, lapatinib shows a response in a group of women with metastatic breast cancer, a disease doctors say offers a major clinical challenge.
When treating metastatic breast cancer, doctors often aim to delay disease progression, prolong survival, and optimize the patient’s quality of life. Recent findings regarding the characteristic of some cancers have given doctors a new way to target the disease. They now know some breast cancers carry specific biological targets, and by attacking these targets they can attack the disease with reduced toxicity to the patient. Lapatinib, also known as GW572016, is the result of this new approach. The oral medication is a biologic therapy that inhibits two receptors.
In the study, researchers report between 10 percent and 38 percent of women with metastatic breast cancer responded to lapatinib. They say the drug was also well tolerated by patients.
Currently, lapatinib is in several phase II and phase III studies either alone or in combination with other drugs. So far it appears to work best in patients who excessively produce the markers ErbB2 and/or ErbB1. The results of these studies will, according to researchers, be crucial in confirming the potential benefit of the drug.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting women. Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in the United States from breast cancer.
SOURCE: Core Evidence, 2005