Breast cancer: New therapy kills tumours in 11 days

A powerful new therapy for breast cancer could revolutionise treatment, experts say.

In a recent trial, patients with the aggressive HER2 positive breast cancer were given a combination of two drugs: Herceptin, which is usually prescribed to fight the disease, and Tyverb.

After 11 days, doctors discovered that almost a quarter of the tumours had shrunk significantly while in 11 per cent of cases, the tumours had been entirely destroyed. Altogether, 87 per cent of the patients responded positively to the drug combination.

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Experts leading the trial, which was carried out by the University of Manchester and the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation, heralded the results as "astonishing".

"For solid tumours to disappear in 11 days is unheard of," head researcher Professor Nigel Bundred told the Daily Telegraph. "These are mind-boggling results."

Researcher Professor David Cameron described the moment when doctors realised just how successful the therapy had been. "It was only when the pathologist was scratching around in the lab saying, 'Where is the tumour?' that it became apparent that there was no tumour," he said.

At present, breast cancer is treated with a combination of Herceptin, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and it can take months or years for tumours to respond. The researchers believe that the new therapy could spare many of the 10,000 women diagnosed with HER2 breast cancer in the UK every year from undergoing draining rounds of chemotherapy.

The efficacy also has encouraging implications in terms of cost/benefit analysis. The NHS has previously rejected using Tyverb because of its high cost – £27,000 for a 12-month course. However, if further trials can confirm the drug combination can produce significant results in a matter of days, at a cost of just £1,500 per patient, it is far more likely to be approved for use.