Factoid:
The number of U.S. women diagnosed with breast cancer has remained steady at about 180,000 per year in recent years, but the death rate for breast cancer victims has been dropping about 2 percent a year, according to the American Cancer Society.
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Drug Prolongs Life in Breast Cancer Sufferers
A drug called Herceptin recently approved by the FDA is the first substance shown to extend life in late-stage breast cancer sufferers.
Start Date: 4/25/99
An April 13, 1999 story from Nando Times says that research involving a recently approved drug called Herceptin shows that it can prolong the lives of women suffering the late stages of breast cancer.
The improvement in survival is small -- an average of about four months so far -- but experts say it is noteworthy in a disease that until now has eluded all efforts to slow the progression to death.
Herceptin, a tailor-made antibody that targets bad genes, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in September 1998 for use in breast cancer that has spread, or metastasized, to other parts of the body.
"Metastatic breast cancer is not a curable disease," said Dennis J. Slamon of the University of California at Los Angeles, one of Herceptin's developers. "All we can do is fight a staying action." The latest data show that women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer survived, on average, 24.8 months when treated with Herceptin, compared with 20.4 months for woman receiving other standard treatments. "This is the first time that we have ever seen a survival impact of a treatment," Slamon said.
He predicted that further follow-up will show an even greater survival advantage among women getting the new drug.
Many doctors believe Herceptin is especially notable because it represents a new approach to cancer -- targeting the peculiarities of malignant cells without harming the rest of the body. In addition, Herceptin carries none of the usual cancer drug side effects, such as nausea and hair loss.
Researchers predict the results could be much more impressive when the drug is given at earlier stages of the disease, before it has moved beyond the breast and lymph nodes. [GSReport thanks Stig Agermose for alerting us to this story.]
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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