It has an overall survival rate of 86% of patients at five years.
BARCELONA, 19 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A study by the International Breast Cancer Center-Pangaea Oncology in Barcelona (IBCC) has concluded that adding a type of immunotherapy to chemotherapy increases the survival rate of patients with localized triple-negative breast cancer, the IBCC reported in a statement on Wednesday.
The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that administering pembrolizumab, a type of immunotherapy, and chemotherapy before and after surgery to remove tumors has “better results” than administering chemotherapy alone.
Triple-negative breast cancer is the “most aggressive and worst prognosis” type of breast tumor, accounting for around 15% of all diagnosed breast tumors.
The study is based on a clinical trial involving 1,174 patients with triple-negative breast cancer from 181 health centres in 21 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America.
RESULTS
Five years after treatment, 86.6% of patients who received immunotherapy and chemotherapy are still alive, compared to the overall survival rate of 81.7% of patients treated with chemotherapy and placebo.
IBCC director Javier Cortés has stated that adding ‘pembrolizumab’ to chemotherapy “results in more cures”, and therefore argues that this procedure should be the standard therapy in patients with a triple-negative breast tumour measuring 2 centimetres or more.
Cortés has specified that this therapy increases the patients’ chances of being cured by five points, a fact that “means that, out of every 100 patients treated with immunotherapy, there are 5 more patients who will be cured when they were not before.”
55.3 MONTHS WITHOUT CANCER
In terms of the time that patients lived free of disease, the group treated with the combination of chemotherapy and ‘pembrolizumab’ was an average of 55.3 months free of breast cancer, compared to 54.1 months in the group that received chemotherapy and placebo.
“We must not forget that we still have a lot to do, since there are still patients who die as a result of this type of cancer,” Cortés stressed, insisting on the need to continue researching.
