The addition of targeted treatment to treatment prolongs the lives of people with metastatic breast cancer

A study by UCLA found that using a drug called ribociclib in combination with common hormone therapy may help premenopausal women with the most common type of bad cancer to live longer than if they were given only hormone therapy.

Ribociclib is considered to be a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor that blocks the activity of proteins called cyclin-dependent 4/6 kinase enzymes that promote cell division and cancer growth.

At the beginning of the study, 672 women under 59 years of age had advanced hormone receptor-positive bad cancer / HER2. Seventy percent of women who took the combination therapy were alive after 42 months, compared to 46% of women treated with hormone therapy only.

The findings will be presented at a press conference on June 1 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be published at New England Journal of Medicine Tuesday, June 4 (lifting the embargo on June 1 at 6:30 am at the ASCO press conference).

Dr. Sara Hurvitz, director of the Breast Cancer Clinical Research Program at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Research Center, said the study was the first to show a significant benefit in terms of Overall survival rate for women in this age group with metastatic bad cancer with hormone receptor positive.

"This trial is unique because it concerns younger women with no premenopausal," said Hurvitz, the lead author of the study, also an badociate professor of hematology / oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine. from UCLA. "This is an important group to study because advanced bad cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in women aged 20 to 59, and the vast majority of bad cancers are positive." to hormonal receptors. "

None of the women in the study had been treated for metastatic cancer. Half of the subjects received hormone treatment and placebo. The other half received hormonal treatment in addition to ribociclib.

Hormone therapy, also known as endocrine therapy, is an essential part of the treatment of hormone receptor-positive bad cancer, a form of the disease in which the female-specific hormones promote cancer growth. When administered orally, the treatment works by blocking or lowering estrogen production levels so that cancer cells can not use them to grow and spread – but it eventually stops working in some women.

In women who received the combination, the disease has not progressed for 23.8 months on average, compared with 13 months for those who received endocrine therapy and placebo.

"It's great to see that we are extending someone's life, not just the time his illness is being controlled," Hurvitz said. "Very few trials show an improvement in overall survival, which is what is so phenomenal in the data."

Between 1976 and 2009, the incidence of advanced bad cancer among US women under 40 increased on average by about 2% per year, a larger increase than for any other age group.

In the early 2000s, a team of researchers from the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center, led by Dr. Dennis Slamon, was in the forefront to discover that cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors were effective in the treatment of hormone receptor-positive bad cancer. Their work eventually led to the FDA's approval of ribociclib and other related drugs to treat metastatic bad cancer.

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Other leading authors of the study are Dr. Debu Tripathy of the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas; Dr. Seock-Ah Im from Seoul National University Hospital, Institute for Cancer Research; and Dr. Yen-Shen Lu from Taiwan National University Hospital. The team is currently evaluating these drugs in women with early-stage bad cancer as part of an international clinical trial called NATALEE.

The study was sponsored by Novartis, who developed ribociclib at Novartis Biomedical Research Institutes (NIBR) as part of a research collaboration with Astex Pharmaceuticals.

The UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has about 500 researchers and clinicians engaged in cancer research, prevention, detection, control, treatment, and education. One of the country's largest cancer treatment centers, UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Treatment Center is dedicated to promoting research and transforming basic science into clinical trials. point.

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