Drug Targets Rare Breast Cancer

Ivanhoe Newswire
Monday, December 18, 2006; 12:00 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A rare and aggressive form of breast cancer may have a new enemy.

Researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston report promising results from a new study on a drug that targets the deadly disease.

The study was conduced among patients diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), which makes up only about 1 percent to 2 percent of all breast cancer cases. The disease is characterized by redness and swelling of the breast, along with tenderness, skin color changes, and other symptoms doctors often mistake for other breast conditions. In many cases, IBC is not diagnosed until the cancer has spread to other parts of the body. The five year survival rate is only about 40 percent.

Thirty-five women completed the study, which began with two weeks of treatment with the drug lapatinib (Tykerb), followed by three months of daily lapatinib and weekly chemotherapy. All also had surgery for their cancer. Thirty of the women had at least a 50-percent reduction in the size of their tumors following the combined lapatinib-chemotherapy treatment and just one patient saw a progression of the disease.

What's more, three of the first 21 patients to undergo surgery had no evidence of the disease at the time of their operations, and the researchers noted a response to lapatinib alone in about 25 percent to 30 percent of the women.

"For IBC patients, these results should be very encouraging because there's now more of a dedicated research effort for a type of breast cancer that has long been ignored and misunderstood," reports study author Massimo Cristofanilli, M.D. "With lapatinib, we finally have a drug on which to build effective therapy -- we just have to refine the most effective way to use it."

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SOURCE: Presented at the 29th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in San Antonio, Dec. 14-17, 2006