Experimental Breast Cancer Chemotherapy

Experimental Breast Cancer Chemotherapy

Experimental breast cancer chemotherapy will improve the survival rate of breast cancer patients. There has been a flurry of new discoveries in the past three or four years. If you live near a cancer center affiliated with a metropolitan hospital, your chance of getting one of these new drugs is good.

A number of new breast cancer drugs are not yet approved by FDA but could help you. The drug will have gone through laboratory tests with animals. Usually it also went through phase 1 clinical trials. Now you can get the drug when it is in phase 2 or phase 3 clinical tests with patients.

New breast cancer drugs

The highlight of a recent conference was an announcement about the new breast cancer chemotherapy drugs. The American Society of Clinical Oncology held their annual meeting in June of 2009 in Orlando, Florida.

The new drugs are called PARP inhibitors and they block the ability of cancer cells to repair themselves.

PARP is shorthand for poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase:

• It is an enzyme that some cancer cells have.
• This drug blocks the repair action in the cancer cell.
• The cancer cells die off or become more responsive to traditional chemotherapy drugs.

How PARP Inhibitors Work

This breast cancer drug is an enzyme used by cancer cells to repair DNA damage. So, the inhibitor blocks the repair from occurring. "There's DNA catastrophe, and tumors shrink." Dr. Andrew Tuft is the head of the olaparib study and made this comment at the conference.

The first study involved 116 women with triple-negative breast cancer. It was a random study. The disease had spread to other parts of the body. This accounts for 20% of all breast cancer patients. Those women who received BSI-201 lived longer than those who did not receive it.

Dr. Eric P. Winer, Director of the Breast Oncology Center at the Dana Farber Institute in Boston said the following. "While preliminary, these are some of the most exciting results we've seen in a long time." 2009

Other Drugs

In 1998 Herceptin became the drug of choice to target the HER-2 protein. It is an antibody-based breast cancer treatment drug. The protein marker, HER-2, shows up in about 25% of breast cancer patients.

Several experts referred to Genentech's Herceptin as a cure for some women. This drug targets only diseased cells. They consider it a "targeted therapy" and not just ordinary chemotherapy.

Herceptin can be used to treat advanced cancers. The Herceptin studies appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine. One study was an international one. The others were North American studies.

The National Cancer Institute sponsored these studies and the researchers studied more than 6,500 women with early-stage breast cancer. Herceptin appears so potent that researchers raised the possibility that targeted drugs will someday let patients skip chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.

In the 1970s researchers identified tumors that contain estrogen receptors. This paved the way for tamoxifen and raloxifene. They kill cancer cells with estrogen receptors.

But tamoxifen has dangerous side effects. It has been used as a prophylactic drug after mastectomies. Tamoxifen increases a woman’s risk of uterine cancer. Raloxifene (Evista) proved to be safer. But, it also has side effects.

Breast cancer chemotherapy has made great progress. It usually takes 5 to 10 years for a new drug to reach the mainstream. That’s why you will want to consider getting into clinical trials. That way you get the latest medicine and can know what you are getting. Sort of the best of both worlds and that is good news!