Breast Cancer Drug Perjeta Shows ‘Unprecedented’ Success In Clinical Trials

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Perjeta, a new breast cancer drug developed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, has shown “unprecedented” success in extending the lives of patients in a clinical trial, according to research results released on Sunday.
According to Andrew Pollack of the New York Times, patients who took the drug had a median survival period nearly 16 months longer than those in the control group – the longest time ever for a drug used as an initial treatment for metastatic breast cancer, the researchers behind the study claimed.
Furthermore, it could be one of the longest for the treatment of any form of cancer, Pollack added. The researchers, who presented their results Sunday at the annual meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Madrid, said that most treatments prolong survival rates of patients with metastatic cancer (meaning it spread to other parts of the body) by only a few months.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” lead author Dr. Sandra M. Swain of the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington told Pollack. “It’s really unprecedented to have this survival benefit.”
Dr. Swain and her colleagues gave Perjeta (also known as pertuzumab) to patients suffering from a form of breast cancer known as HER2-positive, which accounts for up to 25 percent of all breast cancers, according to Reuters reporter Ben Hirschler. By adding the new treatment to older medicine Herceptin and chemotherapy, they were able to extend the lifespan of HER2-positive patients by 15.7 months versus those on Herceptin and chemotherapy alone.
“The result is a vindication of combining medicines that fight tumor cells in a variety of ways,” Hirschler said. “Both Herceptin and Perjeta are antibodies designed to block the function of HER2, a protein produced by a cancer-linked gene. Perjeta… binds to a different part of the same protein, which makes combining the two drugs extra effective.”
“Adding Perjeta to treatment with Herceptin and chemotherapy resulted in the longest survival observed to date in a clinical study of people with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer,” said Dr. Sandra Horning, Roche’s chief medical officer and the head of the company’s product development, according to the Wall Street Journal. She called the survival results “a magnitude of improvement we rarely see in clinical trials in advanced cancer.”
The trial involved a total of 800 patients, the Journal’s Andrew Morse said, and patients receiving Perjeta along with the Herceptin and chemotherapy lived for a median of 56.5 months compared to just 40.8 months for those who did not receive pertuzumab. Like Herceptin (which is also marketed by Roche) Perjeta is a biologic therapy which is derived from organisms and works by blocking the HER2 protein.
“Perjeta was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012 and is already considered the standard of care in the United States,” said Pollack. However, the successful results could lead to increased use for the drug, which is reportedly used by only half of the women eligible for the treatment. In the US, Perjeta costs about $5,900 a month while Herceptin carries a price tag of roughly $5,300 a month, a Roche spokesman told the Times.
“I think these data are really compelling,” ESMO Executive Board Member Eric Van Cutsem, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium who was not involved in the research, told Reuters. “When you see in breast cancer such a big change in survival with not a lot of cardio-toxicities then that is really practice-changing.”
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