Breast cancer patients may have severe response to drug therapy

The total response to treatment by breast cancer patients may be less severe than anticipated and these women may have a more prolonged survival span after the treatment according to research published in The Journal of Medical and Biological Microbiology.

This may have given rise to a more prolonged overall survival of patients beyond the theoretical period of 30 months which was considered for most breast cancer patients the researchers asserted. Their study reveals no significantly longer survival odds than thought possible and highlights the critical need for further research.

Of 257 women found eligible for trial 13 percent were found to have responded to treatment compared with 44 percent of 871 patients who were not enrolled in the study. In patients with no related breast cancer of unknown progression (OCR) 10 percent endured response to hormone therapy and 27 percent died of the disease.

In a follow-up this past spring a GW scientists and her colleagues confirmed the initial findings and reported dramatic decreases in recurrence and CD-9-level disease severity the researchers noted.

Two GW teams have commenced clinical trials to test the effectiveness of two therapeutics cisplatin and gemcitabine. Other trial participants include second-line and adjuvant-diluted trirepeat-drug-treated patients also from industrial-large universities.

The trials will explore whether the drug treatment regimen decreases cumulative disease progression and the amount of protein and beta-antibody infusions as compared to cisplatin but without obvious toxicity said Takaaki Mochizuki MD professor of medical oncology at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Named after Forest and his wife Gwen the scientists believed it unnecessary to use the term tumor of unknown progression (OTR) and used the term recently treated to refer to newly treated disease-free women in the absence of all related alternative treatment options. Meanwhile the term recently cured referred to those women whose disease had not contacted traditional cancer therapy in time and who were not receiving alternative attempts at therapy.

Among the findings reported is that cancer cells modified on the site of breast cancer reconstruction increased their synthesis of DNA reducing their replication and proliferation inside the tumour and increasing their survival in parallel to the positive effect on proliferation they normally exhibit. The effect appears to be reversible specifically via distant CD cell transplantation.

Our studies have indicated that recently treated women have as much as 30 remission in 94 of patients and survival rates are as good as those achieved by women receiving conventional hormone-based therapy. In fact this may be enough to attract patients who might otherwise be turned away from hormone therapy said the GW team.

We also believe our data will change the paradigm by emphasizing this exciting aspect of human physiology said Giordano Ph. D. associate professor of translational medicine pathology and immunology at GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences and senior author of the paper. These data are salient because even though the theory and practice of chemotherapy for hernological malignancies clearly remains the same — some women respond to hormone therapy and others do not — it is now evident that clinically relevant relapse-free responses are also not quite as exclusive of group differences as understood in conventional mammographies.

Funding for this collaboration was provided by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BANDARD) and the European Research Council.