(Press-News.org) European researchers have proven for the first time that targeting the epidermal growth factor receptor can provide substantial clinical benefit for women with hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer.
At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy, the researchers presented results from a Phase-II randomized trial showing that adding the anti-EGFR antibody cetuximab to cisplatin chemotherapy doubled the response rate and time to progression when compared to cisplatin chemotherapy given alone in a study of 173 heavily pre-treated women.
"We are very excited by these results," said lead researcher Professor Jose Baselga, until recently chief of the division of Hematology/Oncology at Vall d'Hebron Hospitals in Barcelona, Spain, and currently Associate Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, USA. "Although epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) had been considered as a potential target for therapy in breast cancer, this is the first proof that this is the case."
Women in the study had so-called triple negative tumors --meaning they did not express estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors or HER2. These tumors are associated with a poor prognosis, partly because they tend to grow and spread through the body very rapidly, and partly because they do not respond well to other therapies.
Prof Baselga led a team that included researchers from Spain, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, the UK and Israel.
Their study included 173 women with metastatic cancer who were randomized to receive either cetuximab (400 mg/m3 initial dose and then 250 mg/m3 weekly) plus up to six 3-weekly cycles of cisplatin, or cisplatin alone. Patients also had the option to switch to the combination, or cetuximab alone if their disease progressed.
The best overall response rate, of 20%, was seen with the cetuximab/cisplatin combination, the researchers report. This was twice as high as the overall response rate with cisplatin alone (10.3%). Adding cetuximab to cisplatin also more than doubled the median length of progression-free survival, from 1.5 to 3.7 months.
"These two months are very valuable because they more than double the progression-free survival compared to the cisplatin-alone arm," Prof Baselga said. "In this advanced-disease population, this type of improvement is rarely seen and it is highly significant."
"The results of this trial are extremely important and convincing given their magnitude," commented Dr Fabrice André from Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France. "They need now to be confirmed in the context of a large randomized trial."
"In addition to open new avenues in the field of cancer treatment, these results also have implications in the field of cancer biology". Dr André said. "They suggest that EGFR could play a role in the progression of triple-negative breast cancer."
Prof Baselga noted that triple-negative breast cancer probably represents a number of poorly understood sub-groups of breast cancer. "If we work hard at identifying the different subtypes and identify the appropriate targets, we should be able to change the natural history of this disease."
Dr André agreed, saying: "The results of this trial and others are showing that new and different treatments may provide benefit in subsets of patients with the disease, suggesting that this form of breast cancer might be further re-segmented according to molecular subtypes."
INFORMATION: END
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – University of Michigan scientists have identified events inside insulin-producing pancreatic cells that set the stage for a neonatal form of non-autoimmune type 1 diabetes, and may play a role in type 2 diabetes as well. The results point to a potential target for drugs to protect normally functioning proteins essential for producing insulin.
A study published online today in the journal PLoS One shows that certain insulin gene mutations involved in neonatal diabetes cause a portion of the proinsulin proteins in the pancreas' beta cells to misfold. ...
October 10, 2010─(BRONX, NY) ─Two major international studies looking at data from a quarter of a million people around the globe have found a new set of genes associated with body fat distribution and obesity. Researchers at 280 institutions worldwide, including Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, conducted the studies. The research, published in the October 10 online edition of Nature Genetics, sheds light on the biological processes involved in body fat distribution, possibly leading to new ways of treating obesity.
"These studies ...
Los Angeles, CA (October 11, 2010) NFL players with concussions now stay away from the game significantly longer than they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, according to research in Sports Health (owned by American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and published by SAGE). The mean days lost with concussion increased from 1.92 days during 1996-2001 to 4.73 days during 2002-2007.
In an effort to discover whether concussion injury occurrence and treatment had changed, researchers compared those two consecutive six-year periods to determine the circumstances of ...
Patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who have progressed after chemotherapy live significantly longer if treated with the drug abiraterone acetate compared to placebo, the results of a large Phase-III clinical trial confirm.
"This is a major step forward in prostate cancer therapeutics," said Dr Johann de Bono from The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, who presented the study results at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy. "Patients in this Phase-III ...
Many cancer survivors experience changes in sexual function that leave them feeling guilty and a longing for intimacy, Australian researchers told at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy. The researchers say that these sexuality and fertility concerns are often not adequately addressed by doctors.
Professor Bogda Koczwara from Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide said that fertility concerns among cancer survivors was a growing problem, due to a combination of improved cancer treatment outcomes in young cancer survivors ...
In life, we're told, we must take the good with the bad, and how we view these life events determines our well-being and ability to adjust. But according to Prof. Dov Shmotkin of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychology, you need more than the right attitude to successfully negotiate the vicissitudes of life.
As recently reported in Aging and Mental Health, Prof. Shmotkin's research reveals that people's well-being and their adaptation can be ascertained by their "time trajectory" ― their concept of how they have evolved through their remembered past, currently ...
New drugs that target specific molecular mechanisms of cancer have improved the treatment of cancer patients in recent years, but those benefits may come with a cost to the patient's sex life, researchers have found.
At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy, French researchers reported on one of the few studies to investigate the impact of cancer therapy on the sexual functioning of patients.
Dr Yohann Loriot and Dr Thomas Bessede from Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France and colleagues found that patients taking ...
Lung cancer patients who have already been treated with the EGFR inhibitors erlotinib or gefitinib seem to gain further benefits in terms of progression-free survival and tumor shrinkage when treated with the new drug afatinib, the results of a Phase IIb/III trial show.
At the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy, Dr Vincent Miller from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, USA, reported findings from the LUX-Lung 1 trial of afatinib in 585 patients with lung adenocarcinoma whose cancer had progressed after chemotherapy ...
A new-generation lung cancer drug has shown an impressive ability to prevent disease progression when administered as a first-line treatment in patients with advanced disease, investigators reported at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO).
Preliminary results from an ongoing Phase-II trial of the drug PF299804 (PF-299) showed that close to 85% of patients whose cancers harbor mutated forms of the EGFR gene have remained progression-free for at least nine months, reported Dr Tony Mok from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
While some ...
An ongoing Phase-II trial investigating a new, targeted therapy for metastatic urothelial cancer has generated promising early results, Italian researchers reported at the 35th Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Milan, Italy.
Urothelial cancers affect the tissue lining the inner surfaces of the bladder and other parts of the urinary system. In cases of metastatic disease, median survival is approximately 12-15 months and there is a 10-15% chance of prolonging it by the use of standard chemotherapy regimens, particularly in otherwise healthy ...