Researchers at LMU have successfully tested a novel medication that can greatly prolong the lives of patients with cancer”>breast cancer.
Brain metastases are frequently observed in patients with advanced HER2-positive cancer”>breast cancer. Patients who experience this have little likelihood of surviving the following few years while receiving current treatments like radiotherapy and surgery.
A new medication has now been examined in a clinical study by an international team of researchers co-led by Professor Nadia Harbeck, Director of the Breast Center at LMU University Hospital. “With great results,” reports the oncologist.
According to the findings to date, survival times increase substantially. The results of the trial have been published in the journal Nature Medicine. Modern medicine divides cancer”>breast cancer into different types according to tumorbiological characteristics.
50% of patients with advanced cancer”>breast cancer and the tissue marker HER2 will suffer from brain metastases, which it has not been possible to treat successfully with drugs before now, as the blood-brain barrier often prevents active substances from penetrating into the brain.
New drugs are therefore urgently required. One of these active substances is a so-called antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) called “trastuzumab deruxtecan.” Trastuzumab is an antibody which, once injected in the body, docks precisely to the HER2 protein. Its payload is the active ingredient deruxtecan, which kills cancer cells and is active in the tumor tissue and hardly anywhere else in the rest of the body.
“This is why we can use this active ingredient in the first place,” explains Harbeck. “Otherwise, it would be much too toxic.” To determine the benefit of the ADC for HER2-positive cancer”>breast cancer, the LMU oncologist launched the DESTINY-Breast12 study as one of the two principal investigators.