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WEDNESDAY, April 5 (HealthDay News) -- Combining the drug Herceptin with one or more P13K-inhibiting agents may benefit breast cancer patients with HER2-positive tumors that don't respond to Herceptin alone, researchers say.
The early findings in studies involving cell cultures and mice were reported at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, in Washington, D.C.
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The results were promising enough that the research team at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston plans to conduct a phase I/II clinical trial of this treatment in HER2-positive breast cancer patients whose disease has progressed despite treatment with Herceptin alone.
"More than half of patients with HER2-positive tumors don't respond to Herceptin as a single agent, and our research has shown us why that is and what might be done to help these patients," study author Dr. Dihua Yu, a professor in the department of surgical oncology, said in a prepared statement.
"If this drug cocktail shows benefit, we hope to be able to identify those patients who won't respond to Herceptin before they start the treatment, and offer them a new and beneficial drug combination. Patients who don't respond to Herceptin have worrisome outcomes, so we hope this strategy will help them," Yu said.
In previous research, Yu and her colleagues found a correlation between Herceptin response and high levels of PTEN (a powerful tumor suppressor gene), and a lack of response to Herceptin and low levels of PTEN. This means that the presence of PTEN in a HER2-positive tumor is a strong predictor of which women will respond to Herceptin, they said.
More information
The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about breast cancer (www.cancer.gov ).
-- Robert Preidt
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