Thousands of women with advanced breast cancer could live longer after a “game-changing” combination therapy stopped tumours in their tracks.
A new drug used alongside an existing hormone therapy halted tumour growth for nine months in women with the most common type of breast cancer, twice as long as when the hormones were used alone, according to an international trial. Scientists have called on the NHS to fund the drug, which is likely to be approved this year.
About three quarters of the 50,000 British women who develop breast cancer each year have the hormone- receptor positive, HER2-negative type. While early treatment is successful for many, about 8,000 women a year will suffer relapses, sometimes years later.
In a study of 521 such women in 17 countries, researchers gave half the patients palbociclib alongside the hormone drug fulvestrant, while the others received fulvestrant and a placebo.
Palbociclib targets a gene that drives the growth of cancer cells and by combining it with a hormone therapy, doctors can block the two key ways that tumours spread. The tumours of two thirds of women given both drugs shrank, or were held in check, compared with 40 per of those given fulvestrant alone.
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Tumours took an average of 9.5 months to get any bigger in women given both drugs, compared with 4.6 months in the control groups, scientists report in The Lancet Oncology.
“This is one of the biggest advances recently for this type of breast cancer,” Nicholas Turner, who led the study at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said. “We hope our results lead to the adoption of this drug combination in breast cancer, where it delays the need to start chemotherapy by an average of nine months.”
Dr Turner said that palbociclib could be used in women with earlier stage disease, “to see if it can offer cures”.
However, whether the NHS will approve palbociclib, which costs $10,000 (£7,100) a month in the US, is unclear as health chiefs are restricting routine access to medicines in an overhaul of the government’s cancer drugs fund.
Samia al Qadhi, chief executive of the charity Breast Cancer Care, said: “This groundbreaking study shows that combining these two drugs has the potential to extend the lives of people with secondary breast cancer, which is incurable, by up to nine months. All cancer patients deserve access to treatments which are clinically effective.”
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Paul Workman, chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research, said: “This trial is an exciting example of one of the most promising approaches to overcoming drug resistance, by combining drugs with different mechanisms of action to block off cancer’s escape routes.”