Some women with very advanced breast cancer may have a new treatment option. A combination of two drugs that more precisely target tumors significantly extended the lives of women who had stopped responding to other medicines, doctors reported on Friday.
It was the first big test of combining Herceptin and Tykerb. In a study of 300 patients, women receiving both drugs lived nearly five months longer than those given Tykerb alone.
Doctors hope for an even bigger benefit in women with less advanced disease, and were elated at this much improvement for very sick women who were facing certain death.
“We don’t see a lot that works in patients who have seen six prior therapies as they did in this trial, so that alone is exciting,” said Jennifer Litton, a breast cancer specialist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The good results are in stark contrast to two other studies that found no survival advantage from Avastin, a drug whose approval for breast cancer patients was very controversial. Two infusions of Avastin a month, as needed for this treatment, can run as much as US$30,000 with fees for administering the drug. Its maker, Genentech, says the wholesale price it charges for the drug averages US$7,700 a month.
Considering Avastin’s potential side effects — blood clots in the lungs, poor wound healing, kidney problems — a survival benefit “would have made the cost of the drug less painful to take,” Litton said.
She had no role in any of the studies, which were reported Friday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
Herceptin and Tykerb aim at a protein called HER-2 that is made in abnormally large quantities in about one-fourth of all breast cancers. Herceptin blocks the protein on the cell’s surface; Tykerb does it inside the cell.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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