Wonder drug kills off breast tumours

A WONDER drug being used before surgery to fight an aggressive form of breast cancer is reducing the need for mastectomies.

Using Herceptin together with chemotherapy before surgery shrinks and in many cases eradicates the tumours, research shows.

It eradicated tumours in 43% of patients with HER-2 positive breast cancer — almost twice as many as for patients treated with chemotherapy alone (23%).

The drug also reduced the spread of the cancer to other parts of the body, such as the lymph nodes, in 38% of women with the disease.

Chemotherapy has been used as a single treatment to shrink large tumours, so that operations can be performed with less risk of having to remove the whole breast.

The final results of the global study, presented at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago at the weekend, increases the possibility of using breast-conserving surgery for more women.

More than 2,200 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Ireland every year, and up to 30% will have the more aggressive form known as HER-2 positive.

Cancer specialist Professor John Crown, who attended the meeting, said Herceptin was a wonderful drug. He said cancer specialists in Ireland had been using it to treat cancer patients before surgery for 18 months.

“This confirms what we have known for a long time,” he said.