Too often, cancer has a way of evading treatment. Tumors that were held in check begin to spread anew, forcing doctors to try different drugs in a desperate race to keep malignant cells from multiplying.
For a common type of breast cancer, this usually happens because of changes in a gene called ESR1. Mutations there can drive cancer growth even as physicians’ first choice of therapy chokes off the resources that tumors had relied on to survive.
Afterwards, the prognosis for patients gets worse. Multiple second-line medicines exist, but “their benefit is limited, quality of life decreases and survival rates are low,” according to Nicholas Turner, director of clinical research and development at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.
New study results from Turner and others show an experimental drug from AstraZeneca, camizestrant, can help sustain the benefit of first-line therapy. Unveiled Sunday, their research found that, once ESR1 mutations are detected, swapping out a standard component of that initial regimen for AstraZeneca’s drug reduced the risk of disease progression or death by more than half.
Data from the study, which AstraZeneca funded and in February said succeeded, will be presented Sunday afternoon at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting.
“Patients have an urgent need for new treatments that can prolong time on first-line therapy and delay disease progression,” Turner said in a statement provided by ASCO.
In their clinical trial, Turner and colleagues enrolled 3,256 people with advanced breast cancer positive for hormone receptors but negative for a protein called HER2. These individuals are typically treated with a kind of hormone therapy known as an aromatase inhibitor along with another type of targeted drug that interrupts cancer cell division. READ MORE
by Ned Pagliarulo
Source: biopharmadive.com
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