Updated: 03.24.2022 17:18 h.
They find a new treatment for breast cancer. Trastuzumab deruxtecan, a drug that acts as a “Trojan horse” by outwitting tumor cells to enter and destroy them, has come to be considered standard second-line therapy in metastatic breast cancer HER2-positive. This is due to the good results of the clinical trial led by the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) in Barcelona.
In the fight against breast cancer, great efforts continue to be made to develop new treatments that help increase the available arsenal. This is the most frequently diagnosed tumor among women and the one in which research has advanced the most, until reaching this new minimally invasive therapy.
Antibodies
The best results of this “Troy Horse” they are caused by the combination of 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 is administered intravenously.
Shortly after being injected it travels through the blood to tumor cells. Once there, the antibody recognizes the entry point of these malignant organisms, in this case the HER2 receptor, enters undetected and releases the chemotherapy it carries to destroy them, without damaging other healthy cells as much.
Vall d’Hebron studio
The Director of the International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) and Associate Researcher of the VHIO, Dr. Javier Cortes, has led the DESTINY-Breast 03 clinical study, which has demonstrated the efficacy of this drug. The 75,8% of patients who received trastuzumab deruxtecan remain without worsening cancer at 12 months, compared to 34,1% in the case of the group that received the standard treatment. In other 16% of the cases the tumor has disappeared after inoculating this “Trojan horse”.
The results of this study they 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 been submitted to peer review -an evaluation made by experts external to the work- and it has been published in the The New England Journal of Medicineconfirming the robustness of the data obtained.
“It is a pride that the magazine 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 lucky enough to lead this study at an international level”, Dr. Cortés highlighted. This drug thus becomes the new standard of treatment in second line for patients with HER2-positive cancer.
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