A chemotherapy drug for women with a certain type of early stage breast cancer may be just as effective when used half as long as currently recommended, a new study suggests.
For the study, researchers conducted a clinical trial involving approximately 4,000 HER2-positive early breast cancer patients. Participants were treated with Herceptin, Roche's brand name trastuzumab chemotherapy medication, for six months or one year.
The study, conducted between 2007 and 2011, found patient outcomes did not significantly change based on treatment duration. After surgery, 89.4 percent of patients treated with Herceptin for six months were alive and cancer free four years later, compared to 89.8 percent of participants who took the drug for one year, reports Reuters.
The study also found twice as many participants in the 12-month group ceased Herceptin treatment due to heart problems compared with the six-month group (8 percent vs. 4 percent), states Reuters.
"We are confident that this will mark the first steps towards a reduction in treatment duration for many women with HER2-positive breast cancer," said Helena Earl, PhD, the study's lead investigator and professor of clinical cancer medicine at the University of Cambridge in England, according to the report.
Currently, 12 months of Herceptin is the only treatment indication for HER2-positive early breast cancer approved by the FDA. Reuters reports a single year of Herceptin treatment costs about $76,700 in the United States.
The research is slated to be presented in June at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago.
Although the findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Dr. Dean said the findings would be published in such a journal following "rigorous scientific scrutiny" by other researchers, according to The New York Times.
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