New Drugs Are Replacing Chemo for Aggressive Breast Cancer
Drug companies have found promising new options for one of the most aggressive and hardest-to-treat forms of breast cancer after decades with few breakthroughs.
Gilead Sciences won Food and Drug Administration approval Wednesday to sell its drug Trodelvy as a first treatment for newly diagnosed patients with the advanced form of a type of breast cancer known as “triple negative” because it has characteristics that render common treatments ineffective.
It is the second such approval in about a month: AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo’s rival drug, Datroway, was approved for a similar group of patients in May. Both of the drugs are antibody-drug conjugates—a type of targeted therapy that uses an antibody to identify a protein found on most triple-negative tumor cells and then delivers a concentrated dose of chemotherapy directly into the cancer.
The aim is to spare more healthy tissue than standard chemotherapy, which attacks growing cells throughout the body. These drugs both reduced the risk of progression of the disease by around 40% when compared with chemo.
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Upward of 48,000 Americans were diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer last year. It is often diagnosed in younger, Black and Latina women. Patients with the advanced form of the disease live for a median of less than two years.
The disease’s speed is why doctors say the first treatment choice matters more than for slower-moving cancers. Triple-negative breast cancer recurs and spreads after an average of around 2½ years, compared with five years for other breast cancers. About half of patients never get a second type of treatment.
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