Treatment Before You Go Under

Since it is Breast Cancer awareness month, I wanted to look up breast cancer research news. Most of what popped up was how to be aware if you had breast cancer, however this one article stood out to me “FDA Approves Using Perjeta Before Surgery to Treat High-Risk HER2-Positive Breast Cancer.” I work in a lab that does drug trial testing and I know it take a lot of studies to get the FDA to approve medications and treatments, so I had to look into this.

 

September 30, 2013 the FDA approved Perjeta with combination of Herceptin and Taxotere to be used to treat HER2-postitive, early-stage, inflammatory or locally advanced-stage breast cancer. This combination is given before surgery neoadjuvant (treatment given before a big treatment) treatments. This is the first and only neoadjuvant regimen that has been approved by the FDA to treat breast cancer. The effectiveness of the treatment given before surgery is based on how many active cancer cells. If there are no cancer cells present, then it is less likely that the cancer will come back.

 

Some of you might be wondering what HER2-postitive means, I had the same question. Her2-positive breast cancer is where there are too many copies of the HER2/neu gene. If there are too many copies of this gene, there is too much HER2 protein and therefore it causes breast cancer. The HER2-positive breast cancer is more aggressive than the  HER2-negative. Treatments such as  Herceptin and Perjeta block the cancer cell’s ability to receive growth signals.

 

With any drug there are always side effects, this drug combination has some severe side effects such as effecting heart function or developing heart failure. When receiving these medicines your heart function is evaluated. There are also common side effects i.e. hair loss, diarrhea, nausea and low white blood cell count.

 

If you were diagnosed with HER2-positive, early-stage, locally advanced or inflammatory breast cancer would you risk the side effects and take this drug? Does it help that the FDA has approve of this combination? Or does it worry you that sometimes the FDA retracts their approvals? There has been studies done with this drug but is that enough for you believe these treatments work?

 

Here is the link to the article if you would like to read more in depth of this drug:

http://www.breastcancer.org/research-news/20131004-2