Tag Archives: herceptin

Targeted treatment herceptin found to greatly improve long-term survival of her2-positive breast cancer patients — ScienceDaily

Published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study found that Herceptin, when added to chemotherapy, improved 10-year survival from 75 percent with chemotherapy alone to 84 percent with the addition of trastuzumab. Additionally, results also demonstrated continued improvement of survival without cancer recurrence — the 10-year disease-free survival rate increased from 62 percent to 74 percent with the addition of trastuzumab. Although heart problems are recognized side effects of Herceptin, the incidence rate of such events was found to be about 3 percent and the majority of those patients recovered from the initial effects. “We have found that when Herceptin is used in combination with chemotherapy, a patient’s survival is significantly improved,” said Geyer, who serves as a senior scientific advisor to the NSABP and at Massey is the Harrigan, Haw, Luck Families Chair in Cancer Research, associate director for clinical research and member of the Developmental Therapeutics research program, as well as professor in the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Palliative Care at the VCU School of Medicine. …

Years after treatment for HER2-positve early stage breast cancer, trastuzumab continues to show life-altering benefit

They found that the use of trastuzumab produced a 37 percent improvement in survival and a 40 percent reduction in risk of cancer occurrence, compared to patients treated with chemotherapy alone. These findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, demonstrate how important trastuzumab has been to the treatment of this form of breast cancer, says the study’s lead author, Edith A. Perez, M.D., deputy director at large, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and director of the Breast Cancer Translational Genomics Program at Mayo Clinic in Florida…

Years after treatment for HER2-positve early stage breast cancer, trastuzumab continues to show life-altering benefit — ScienceDaily

New treatment target identified for aggressive breast cancer — ScienceDaily

The gene ErbB2, commonly called HER2, is highly expressed in about 25 percent of breast cancers. Scientists have now found the protein Erbin, thought to be an anti-tumor factor, also is highly expressed in these cancers and essential to ErbB2’s support of breast cancer. When scientists interfere with the interaction between the two in mice, it inhibits tumor development and the usual spread to the lungs, according to an international team reporting in the journal PNAS. The team documented the overexpression of both in 171 cases of mostly aggressive human breast cancer as well. …

Herceptin plus taxol highly effective in low-risk breast cancer

The study is the first major trial to examine the Herceptin-Taxol combination in patients who have a type of breast cancer with the biology known as small, node-negative, HER2+. Results were presented during the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. "This is great news for patients and their physicians," said Kathy Albain, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center, who is one of the co-authors of the national multicenter study. "This study identifies a new treatment option for this population of patients that is highly effective and has minimal side effects." First author is Sara Tolaney, MD, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute…

Nanodrug targeting breast cancer cells from the inside adds weapon: Immune system attack

The research team developing the drug — led by scientists at the Nanomedicine Research Center, part of the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center — conducted the study in laboratory mice with implanted human breast cancer cells. Mice receiving the drug lived significantly longer than untreated counterparts and those receiving only certain components of the drug, according to a recent article in the Journal of Controlled Release. Researchers from the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai, the Division of Surgical Oncology at UCLA, and the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA also participated in the study. …