BREAST CANCER
Barcelona, Mar 23 (EFE).- Trastuzumab deruxtecan, a drug that acts as a “Trojan horse” by tricking tumor cells to enter and destroy them, has come to be considered standard second-line therapy in metastatic breast cancer HER2-positive, after the good results of the clinical trial.
In the fight against breast cancer, the most frequently diagnosed tumor among women, great efforts continue to be devoted to developing new treatments that help increase the available arsenal.
One of the lines that is achieving better results is the one that combines an antibody with a chemotherapy drug, which is known as an antibody-drug conjugate or ADC.
Trastuzumab deruxtecan belongs to this class of treatment and works as follows: It is administered intravenously and travels through the blood to the tumor cells, where the antibody recognizes the portal of entry of these malignant cells, in this case the receptor HER2 enters undetected and releases the chemotherapy it carries to destroy them, without damaging other healthy cells as much.
Dr. Javier Cortés, director of the International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) and associate researcher at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), has led the DESTINY-Breast 03 clinical study, which has demonstrated the efficacy of this drug.
75.8% of the patients who received Trastuzumab deruxtecan remain without worsening cancer at 12 months, compared to 34.1% in the case of the group that received standard treatment.
In addition, in 16% of cases the tumor has disappeared after the administration of the new drug.
The results of this study were already presented at the presidential session of the Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in September 2021.
Now, the study has undergone peer review (evaluation by experts outside the work) and has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirming the strength of the data obtained.
“It is a pride that The New England Journal of Medicine has accepted these data, publishes them and says that this is a new standard of treatment for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, even more so when we have been fortunate to lead this study at an international level”, highlighted Dr. Cortés.
Thus, this drug becomes the new standard of second-line treatment -the one applied when the first treatment does not work- for patients with HER2-positive cancer, which affects 20% of patients with breast cancer and it is one of the most aggressive subtypes.
The Destiny Breast-03 trial enrolled 524 patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, recruited between July 20, 2018, and June 23, 2020, at 169 centers in 15 countries.
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