GSK (GlaxoSmithKlien) announced a new drug that can be used as a back-up to Herceptin, or when necessary, replace Herceptin. These drugs are for women whose breast cancer is Her-2 (her-2/neu) positive. Approximately 1 in 4 women diagnosed with breast cancer are Her2-positive: her-2/neu is a gene that would normally regulate cell growth that goes ballistic and overexpresses.
Cancers that result from overexpressed oncogenes such as HER2/neu tend
to be more nasty or belligerent and are more likely to recur than other
cancers. They also may respond to different types of treatment than
other breast cancers.
Back to the media promoted GSK announcement. As you can see Her2-positive breast cancers are not easy to deal with. Yet, while Andrew Pollack gives some good information in this NYTimes article, I want to strangle this f**kwad of a doctor for his quote found in the following paragraph, the 7th paragraph out of 22.
Dr. Winer, who has consulted for GlaxoSmithKline, predicted at a
symposium here that death from the type of breast cancer treated with
Herceptin and Tykerb, known as Her-2 positive, would be eliminated
within 10 years. In an interview, he conceded that other drugs would
have to be developed, but said he was confident they would be.
It’s nice to be optimistic, but I feel that it is completely irresponsible for this doctor to make a prediction without including the whole story, and then include the need for more and different meds in order to acheive this outcome after the fact in an interview.
Now that my rant is over, what interested me about this therapy, is found deep in the article.
One potential advantage of Tykerb over Herceptin is that it may help fight tumors that spread from the breast into the brain.
Such
spreading occurs in about 25 percent to 45 percent of women who take
Herceptin, Dr. Winer said. Even if a woman’s breast tumor is kept in
check by Herceptin, tumors in the brain can cause neurological problems
like blindness and paralysis and can be fatal.Herceptin is too
big to cross the barrier that protects the brain from most things in
the bloodstream. But there is preliminary evidence that Tykerb can
enter the brain.
After having one scare that my bc metastisized to the brain (which is not her2-positive), this peaked my interest. I’d hazard to guess that there are a few folks that don’t realize that bc can come back, and there are certain areas of the body, that it will show up:
- the breast or the area where the breast used to be,
- the chest wall,
- the lymph nodes,
- the bones,
- the lungs or around the lungs,
- the liver, or
- the brain.
[...]Breast cancer can return in three general locations. It can be:
- Local: in the breast where it started, or in the skin and underlying tissues where the breast used to be.
- Regional: in the lymph nodes next to the breast.
- Metastatic: in another part of the body, such as the lung, liver, bone, or brain, or in lymph nodes far from the breast.
We must remember that these drugs are not cures. They work to reduce recurance, they don’t iradicate breast cancer, which Pollack responsibly writes in the very first paragraph.
