Good News re Triple Negative Cancers
Posted 10/7/2010
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Triple negative breast cancers are those that are negative for her2, estrogen, and progesterone. This means that treatments with herceptin or estrogen therapies (the AIs and Tamoxifen) are not useful or relevant. Thought to be generally aggressive breast cancers, women with this diagnosis often worry even more than some of the rest of us. We have long known that triple negative breast cancers are especially responsive to chemotherapy, and here is some more good news about that from Medpage and the recent ASCO Breast Cancer Conference:
Two-thirds of patients with triple-negative breast cancer achieved pathologic complete response (pCR) with neoadjuvant chemotherapy consisting of carboplatin and docetaxel (Taxotere), data from a small clinical study showed.
Nine of 14 patients had confirmed pCR with the regimen, which was generally well tolerated. The findings are consistent with those of a larger patient series reported recently showing a high rate of pCR in patients with triple-negative locally advanced breast cancer treated with neoadjuvant platinumdocetaxel chemotherapy.
The favorable prognostic outcomes associated with pCR, including survival, warrant larger, prospective investigations of the regimen in patients with triple-negative breast cancer, German investigators reported here at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's Breast Cancer Symposium.
"As a surrogate marker for progression-free survival, pathologic complete response opens the opportunity for similar survival rates in patient groups with triple-negative, in addition to non-triple negative cancers."
http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ASCOBreast/22574
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