USATODAY.com - Breast cancer drug hailed

Breast cancer drug hailed
By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY, Posted 10/19/2005 5:04 PM

Herceptin, a drug already used to treat certain advanced breast cancers, also works against an aggressive type of early breast cancer, according to three studies published today involving 5,000 women.

Some doctors are hailing the findings as a major advance in treating breast cancer — the second-most-deadly cancer in U.S. women, behind lung cancer — although results apply to only a small subset of patients.

"Clearly, the results ... are not evolutionary but revolutionary," Gabriel Hortobagyi, director of the breast cancer program at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, writes in an editorial that accompanies the studies in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Jo Anne Zujewski, who directs breast cancer therapy research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which financed two of the studies, says the findings support her belief that breast cancer has become curable in increasing numbers of women. "I am using the 'cure' word," Zujewski said Wednesday, adding that "it's not like we now have a cure and yesterday we didn't. This is one more group of women who used to have a poor prognosis and now have a good prognosis."

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