A new drug is said to be a game-changer in the batter against breast cancer. Breast cancer is a disease that is diagnosed in more than 300,000 Americans every year. This new drug is said to target tumors with remarkable precision.
Is this a cure for cancer?
A 49-year-old breast cancer patient, Dikla Benzeevi, has been living with breast cancer for 17 years. As cancer spread to her lungs, she went through 15 different drugs. Last year, her doctors suggested that she join a trial of a new drug that is said to target her disease called the HER2-positive breast cancer, and it is metastatic.
After undergoing the tests and taking the new drug, she said that there were no new tumors found, and she's been stable, which is a good sign.
What is HER2?
HER2 is a gene that results in aggressive breast cancer, and it occurs in 20% of patients with metastatic disease. Some targeted therapies, like Herceptin, usually stop working as cancer becomes resistant.
The HER2 gene makes HER2 proteins. HER2 proteins are receptors on breast cells. Usually, HER2 receptors help control how a healthy breast cell grow, repair, and divide itself. In about 10% to 20% of breast cancers, the HER2 gene does not work correctly, and it makes too many copies of itself. All these extra HER2 genes tell breast cells to make too many HER2 receptors. This makes breast cells grow and divide in an uncontrolled way.
Breast cancers with HER2 protein overexpression or HER2 gene amplification are called HER2-positive in the pathology report. HER2-positive breast cancers tend to grow faster, and they are more likely to spread and come back compared to HER2-negative breast cancers. But there are medicines specifically for HER2-positive breast cancers.
The results of the trial for the new drug were released at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, and it was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The drug that is labeled as DS-8201, for now, was tested in 184 breast cancer patients. The tumors shrank in 61% of the patients, and the tumors disappeared in 6% of the patients.
Dr. Ian Krop, one of the authors of the results of the trial, said that this new drug works basically by selectively delivering high concentrations of chemotherapy directly to the cancer cells. It is essentially like a guided missile.
The growth of cancer was halted for 16 months, which was longer than what is usually seen with current therapies. Krop also said that patients were able to get back on with their lives and not have to worry about cancer so much while the drug was working.
Update on the cancer cure
The new drug came with very serious side effects, and it included severe lung injury that leads to the death of four patients. Moving forward, the safety of the drug is going to be a concern, and experts will concentrate on solving the side effect issue. However, the drug has been so successful that the Food and Drug Administration has decided to fast track its approval process of the drug, which could make it available for use as early as 2020.
