They discover a new drug capable of curbing breast cancer in 75% of cases

The trastuzumab deruxtecana drug that acts as un “Trojan horse” by tricking tumor cells into and destroying themhas come to be considered standard second-line therapy in metastatic breast cancer HER2-positive, after the good results of the clinical trial.

In the fight against breast cancer, the most frequently diagnosed tumor among women, great efforts continue to be devoted to developing new treatments that help increase the available arsenal.

One of the lines that is achieving the best results is the one that combines an antibody with a chemotherapy drugwhich is known as antibody-drug conjugate or ADC.

Trastuzumab deruxtecan belongs to this class of treatment and works as follows: It is administered intravenously and travels through the blood to the tumor cells, where the antibody recognizes the portal of entry of these malignant cells, in this case the receptor HER2 enters undetected and releases the chemotherapy it carries to destroy them, without damaging other healthy cells as much.

The doctor Javier Cortés, director of the International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) and associate researcher at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), has led the DESTINY-Breast 03 clinical study, which has demonstrated the efficacy of this drug.

75.8% of patients who received Trastuzumab deruxtecan remain without worsening cancer at 12 monthscompared to 34.1% in the case of the group that received the standard treatment.

What’s more, in 16% of cases the tumor has disappeared after administration of the new drug.

The results of this study were already presented at the presidential session of the Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in September 2021.

Now, the study has undergone peer review (assessment by experts outside the work) and has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirming the strength of the data obtained.

“We are proud that The New England Journal of Medicine has accepted these data, published them and said that this is a new standard of care for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, even more so when we have been fortunate to lead this study at an international level”, highlighted Dr. Cortés.

A) Yes, this drug becomes the new standard of second-line treatment -the one that is applied when the first treatment does not give results- for patients with HER2-positive cancerwhich affects 20% of patients with breast cancer and is one of the most aggressive subtypes.

The Destiny Breast-03 trial enrolled 524 patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, recruited between July 20, 2018, and June 23, 2020, at 169 centers in 15 countries.