Triple Negative News

Elena got this article from a friend...Not sure of the source....


Progress against cancer does not move at a constant velocity; sometimes there are watershed moments when the pace accelerates…..”
Yesterday, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology was one of those moments; another milestone in the treatment of breast cancer.
We saw one of those major milestones in this decade when Herceptin was introduced for the treatment of HER2+ metastatic breast cancer. A whole new modality of treatment, targeted biological therapy, then became established as an important component of adjuvant treatment in earlier stage breast cancer.
Now, "the biggest story in breast cancer right now is the PARP inhibitors," Clifford Hudis, chief of breast cancer medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was quoted during a recent interview. "Any time you open up a new target, that's an exciting moment. These drugs may potentially be active not just to treat metastatic disease but to prevent recurrence."
And excitement there was, as news of PARP inhibitors was presented at the annual meeting attended by more than 30,000 oncologists. Even more exciting was that PARP inhibitors are being shown to be effective in triple negative tumors which often affects younger women at a higher rate and is responsible for about 15 percent of all breast cancer.
Since triple negative breast cancer lacks the three genetic targets needed for hormonal and Her2 therapies, the only effective treatment had been chemotherapy. It’s about time we have an effective targeted therapy for this form of the disease which occurs in about 15 percent of all breast cancers and affects younger women more than other forms.
“If the cancer is detected early enough, treatment with a PARP inhibitor may be able to permanently destroy the tumors…” , Barry Sherman, chief medical officer of Bi-Par Sciences, Inc. said in an interview at the conference yesterday. “There is an opportunity here to actually use the term 'cure' when it's applied to early-stage disease. That is perhaps one of the most exciting notions to come out of this. This is the forefront of a field that is about to open up, about DNA repair."
Bi-Par Sciences, recently purchased by Sanofi-Aventis, presented Phase II trial results that showed that their experimental cancer drug helped patients with advanced breast tumors live more than 60 percent longer using this new method that stops diseased cells from healing themselves.
The treatment, called BSI-201, shrank tumors and slowed new growth in a study of 116 patients with triple- negative breast cancer.
BSI-201 leads this exciting and emerging class of treatments known as PARP inhibitors. Most cancer treatments work by blasting DNA with chemotherapy or radiation. Cancer can fight back by using PARP enzymes to fix damaged strands of DNA. The new medicines are designed to block the enzymes and kill the cancer.
There are six different repair mechanisms in healthy human cells to repair DNA. When cancer develops, many of those mechanisms break down and leave the cell dependent on PARP to fix genetic damage from cancer treatments. Researchers have found that several forms of cancer in the ovaries, uterus, lungs and pancreas all have unusually high PARP enzyme activity, making them good targets for new therapies in other cancers as well, opening up a new era of cancer treatment.
In Sanofi's study, half of patients were given BSI-201 and a combination of chemotherapies, carboplatin and Eli Lilly & Co.'s Gemzar, and half were given chemo and a placebo. About 60 percent of patients who took BSI-201 saw their tumors shrink and cancer slow, almost three times as many as those who took only chemotherapy.
The median lifespan after treatment with BSI-201 was 9.2 months, compared with 5.7 months in the control group. Sometimes a few months might seem like baby steps, but these numbers are significant even in relation to our earlier blockbuster treatment, Herceptin. In highly pre-treated metastatic women, these additional months are noteworthy, and we are hopeful to see even more significant numbers in earlier stage women.
There were no significant side effects from the BSI-201 treatment, which was added to standard chemotherapy in this research trial. A separate study was presented at the conference showing that a similar PARP inhibitor, called olaparib and made by AstraZeneca Plc, shrank tumors even when administered without chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
Sanofi will begin enrollment for an expanded trial of 400 patients in the next two months to confirm the results and the company estimates this could take as little as a year to complete before submitting to FDA regulators for market approval.
PARP inhibitors are the biggest story in breast cancer right now and another milestone on our war against the disease!
There is more hope!!!