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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A phase III clinical trial of 4,805 women with HER2-positive breast cancer suggests adding a second HER2 targeted medicine, pertuzumab (Perjeta), to standard of care trastuzumab (Herceptin) after surgery may help, although the benefit is modest.

The study will be featured in a press briefing today and presented at the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

At an early follow up of three years, 93.2% of women who received trastuzumab alone had not developed invasive disease compared with 94.1% of those who received pertuzumab and trastuzumab, a difference of 1%. While the prognosis for patients who receive standard of care trastuzumab is already favorable, patients in the study who received pertuzumab and trastuzumab had a 19% lower chance of developing invasive breast cancer than those who received trastuzumab alone.

[...] While trastuzumab targets only HER2, pertuzumab blocks HER2 and HER3. Using both antibodies establishes a more complete blockade of cancer cell growth signals and may lower the chance of treatment resistance. The authors estimate that about 8% of all patients diagnosed with breast cancer (about 20,000 women in the United States alone) have early, HER2-positive disease and may benefit from this adjuvant therapy.

[...] Overall, 63% of patients had cancer that had spread to the lymph nodes (node-positive disease), and 36% had hormone receptor-negative disease. There were similar proportions of patients with either disease characteristic in the two treatment groups.

The addition of pertuzumab to trastuzumab lowered the chance of developing invasive breast cancer by 19% compared to trastuzumab alone. At a median follow up of almost 4 years, 171 (7.1%) patients in the pertuzumab group had developed invasive breast cancer, compared to 210 (8.7%) patients in the placebo group.

-- submitted from IRC

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