Breast cancer treatment advances previewed at ASCO

By Mary Hardin

Results of a three-year nationwide clinical trial evaluating Taxol and Adriamycin to treat advanced breast cancer indicate the two drugs are equivalent in effectiveness when used as single therapy agents.

Sledge

The results were presented this week during the 33rd annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Denver. In a plenary address at the meeting, George Sledge, M.D., Ballve-Lantero Professor of Oncology at the Indiana University School of Medicine and principal investigator for the clinical trial, said the study looked at three ways of treating advanced or metastatic breast cancer.

Patients were either treated initially with Adriamycin, a chemotherapy agent which has been used in breast cancer treatment for more than 20 years and previously considered the most active single agent in metastatic breast cancer; initially given Taxol, a new chemotherapeutic agent which was approved for the treatment of breast cancer in 1994; or administered a combination of the two drugs.

The findings indicate that while Taxol (paclitaxel) and Adriamycin (doxorubicin) are equally active single agents in metastatic breast cancer, combining the two significantly increased the overall response rate and time to treatment failure, Sledge said. Also, when a patient received both Taxol and Adriamycin as single agents consecutively over the course of treatments, survival was as good as occurred using the two drugs in combination therapy. It did not matter which of the two drugs was administered first.

"This study is important because it places a new drug (Taxol) in context," said Sledge. "It tells us that this drug is fully the equivalent of the best current drug for treating breast cancer."

Sledge and Michael Stender, an oncology fellow, also presented research at ASCO on levels of Her-2, a protein produced by a specific gene found in some breast cancer cells. Their results suggest a simple blood test may predict patients who may be candidates for biological therapy such as antibody treatments instead of chemotherapy.

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