On Wednesday, test results were released that researchers called "simply stunning": the drug Herceptin was shown to dramatically reduce the recurrence of a common type of breast cancer in its early stage after chemotherapy.
Three international clinical trials on more than 6,500 patients showed that the drug, which has been mostly used to prolong survival of patients with advanced HER2 breast cancer, is profoundly effective in treating those in the early stages as well.
A summary of the trials in the New England Journal of Medicine characterized the results as so positive that Herceptin could possibly lead to "a cure" for the disease.
"This is probably the biggest evidence of a treatment effect I've ever seen in oncology," said Richard Gelber of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which took part in the tests. "It is quite remarkable," Gelber said.
"Clearly, the results ... are not evolutionary but revolutionary," doctor Gabriel Hortobagyi said in the journal.
The particularly aggressive protein HER2 is involved in up to 30 percent of the more than 1 million new breast cancer cases diagnosed worldwide each year. Approximately 400,000 people die annually from the disease.
Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody drug produced in the US by the firm Genentech and known by the generic name trastuzumab, has been used therapeutically on women in the advanced stages of HER2 breast cancer following chemotherapy since 1998.
Because HER2 is frequently resistant to chemotherapy, Herceptin is administered to block the activity of the protein to prevent the cancer's recurrence.
In the largest of the trials, in 2001 the Breast International Group together with European Herceptin manufacturer Roche began testing its effect on 5,000 women in 39 countries who were diagnosed with HER2 cancer in the early stages. Within one year Herceptin users showed clearly positive results.
The rate of recurrence was slashed by 46 percent. This meant that, two years after the beginning of the treatment, there was an 8 percent increase in the number of women who were disease-free.
"The results are simply stunning," Hortobagyi said. "All three trials show highly significant reductions in the risk of recurrence, of a magnitude seldom observed in oncology trials."
The tests also showed a low level of side effects on patients using Herceptin, the Dana-Farber institute reported.
Previous tests of Herceptin use following chemotherapy had generated a significant number of cardiac problems in patients.
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