New Breast Cancer Treatment Introduced

5/31/2009
Maya Garcia
A new drug, recently introduced at the American Society of Clinical Oncology on Sunday, gives hope to sufferers of breast cancer worldwide.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a new drug expected to offer hope to victims of breast cancer is currently under development. Studies of the drug were presented during the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Orlando on Sunday (Wall Street Journal). In the study, the tumors of 116 patients suffering from triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly aggressive brand of the disease, were shrunk (Bloomberg). Despite showing promise, the drug is not expected to cure patients with advanced disease. Furthermore, it is likely to take several more years before any such treatment reaches the market. Reuters comments that the new medicine, PARP – short for poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase, may improve survival rates by 60 percent compared with traditional chemotherapy. It does this by preventing diseased cells from healing themselves (Bloomberg). Bloomberg quotes Clifford Hudis, chief of breast cancer medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, in saying, "These drugs may potentially be active not just to treat metastatic disease but to prevent recurrence."

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