A new breast cancer drug that has shown promise fighting a particularly tough type of tumor may become a viable option for cancer patients. Matthew Ellis, a WUSTL physician at the Siteman Cancer Center, has studied the medication, Lapatinib, since it first showed promise against breast cancer tumors. He is now conducting the final phase of trials for the drug.
KSDK reporter Kay Quinn provides more details about the drug and its advanced trials in the following St. Louis Post-Dispatch article.
Drug shows promise for hard-to-treat breast cancer
(Republished with permission from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This article originally ran in the Health & Fitness section on Monday, August 2, 2004)
By Kay Quinn
It’s a complex disease, and one we tend to refer to casually as a single illness. Yet breast cancer is at least four distinct tumor types, and finding ways to stop it or simply keep it under control is the focus of hundreds of clinical trials under way across the country. The National Institutes of Health alone is overseeing at least 243 clinical trials, all therapies doctors hope may lead to the defeat of breast cancer.
When one drug appears to show promise against one particular type of breast cancer tumor, there is excitement in the medical community. That’s the case with a drug called Lapatinib. It works against a particular type of breast tumor found in 25 percent of women diagnosed with the disease. In stage one clinical trials done at Duke University, almost half of the women with advanced breast tumors of this type who were given Lapatinib had their disease stabilize or had their tumor shrink in the first eight weeks of the study.
To understand how the drug works, it helps to understand a little bit about breast cancer. Lapatinib, a pill, works against a tumor that makes a certain kind of protein called HER-2. The protein is an enzyme that sits on the surface of breast cancer cells and signals the cells to grow in an abnormal way, and even survive in an abnormal way. Lapatinib inhibits or switches off the enzyme; the hope is that the tumor cells will die or at least stop growing.
Lapatinib is now in advanced trials at various sites across the country, including Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Matthew Ellis is the director of medical oncology at Washington University and is looking to enroll women with advanced breast cancer in the final phase of the drug trial. Ellis was at Duke when Lapatinib first showed promise during early testing. He is cautiously optimistic that current clinical trials will prove it works against this type of breast cancer that’s traditionally been difficult to treat.
Candidates for the study are women with hormone-receptor-negative tumors that contain the HER-2 protein, and patients in whom the standard drug therapy Herceptin is no longer effective. For more information on the study, call Washington University at 314-362-8866.
Kay Quinn is an anchor and health beat reporter for KSDK (Channel 5).
Copyright 2004 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.