jueves, 12 de diciembre de 2019

Breast cancer data bonanza

The Readout
Damian Garde

Breast cancer data bonanza

At the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, AstraZeneca and Daiichi yesterday presented data on their experimental drug, trastuzumab deruxtecan. The news was good: About 60.9% of the women tested — all of whom tested positive for the HER2 marker — saw their tumors shrink by at least 30%. As STAT's Matthew Herper explains, patients who received the drug survived for a median 21.9 months, compared to 17.4 months for those in the control group.

Meantime, adding tucatinib, a drug being developed by Seattle Genetics, to the older drug combination of Herceptin and Xeloda reduced the risk of death by 34% in advanced breast cancer.

Dr. Harold Burstein, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, called the trastuzumab deruxtecan result “impressive,” saying it “far outpaces previous reports for agents in the setting of refractory disease.” But he warned that the 10% or 15% rate of pneumonitis, an inflammation of the lung, might be a roadblock for using the drug earlier in the disease. 

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