We certainly seem to be living in exciting times when it comes to new developments in the treatment of breast cancer.
There seems to be a new breast cancer treatment announcement almost every week - well .... there does if your tumour is HER-2 positive at least.
Tumours positive for HER-2 (Herceptin sensitive breast tumours) only account for about 20% of all breast cancer cases. Women in this category had a poorer prognosis until the development of herceptin a few years ago. Now all the dramatic headlines seem to relate to them and each new development serves to raise their hopes even further.
This is a mixed blessing of course - since the other 80% of women either gain false hope from the newspaper headlines - or feel let down by the fact that there is less interest in their type of cancer.
Newest on the headline stage is an announcement today that researchers in Ohio have discovered that using a substance called Interleukin can boost the effect of herceptin by as much as fifty percent. Interleukin works by stimulating the production of a body chemical called Interferon. Interferon makes your immune system much more efficient.
Read more about this here.
Now - before getting too worked up about this you need to realise that this was a very early study and was performed in mice. The scientists found that mice with HER2-positive tumors treated with both Interleukin and Herceptin saw their tumors shrink at least 50 percent more than animals injected with either substance alone.
The researchers have said that treatment with Interleukin and Herceptin was effective in cell cultures and in animals, and they hoped to conduct a clinical trial to test the combination in humans in the near future.
Along with developments such as Tykerb - this can only be good news for women with herceptin sensitive breast cancer. But do please bear in mind that it could be several years before this kind of treatment becomes available .... and other studies in the future may reveal that it is not as beneficial as this early report suggests.
Still - as I said above - we live in exciting times!
Gordon
You can read more about herceptin treatment for breast cancer here
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