In ongoing news about combination drugs and ongoing information coming from the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium there's this...
Tykerb/Femara Combination: Treatment with a combination of GlaxoSmithKline's Tykerb and Novartis' Femara significantly delayed breast cancer progression in women with an aggressive form of the disease, according to a study presented at the symposium, Reuters reports.
The study of 1,286 patients found that a sub-set of 219 women with aggressive HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer -- which involves breast tumors that overproduce the HER2 protein -- who took both drugs together experienced an average of 8.2 months of progression-free survival.
Patients who received only Femara experienced an average of three months without progression. However, the benefit was less significant when the combination treatment was given to patients irrespective of HER2 status, with the treatment extending progression-free survival by just one month, to an average of 11.9 months. According to Reuters, it is unclear if the study produced sufficient evidence to convince oncologists to use the drug combination across a wide population group (Hirschler, Reuters, 12/11).
Tykerb/Femara Combination: Treatment with a combination of GlaxoSmithKline's Tykerb and Novartis' Femara significantly delayed breast cancer progression in women with an aggressive form of the disease, according to a study presented at the symposium, Reuters reports.
The study of 1,286 patients found that a sub-set of 219 women with aggressive HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer -- which involves breast tumors that overproduce the HER2 protein -- who took both drugs together experienced an average of 8.2 months of progression-free survival.
Patients who received only Femara experienced an average of three months without progression. However, the benefit was less significant when the combination treatment was given to patients irrespective of HER2 status, with the treatment extending progression-free survival by just one month, to an average of 11.9 months. According to Reuters, it is unclear if the study produced sufficient evidence to convince oncologists to use the drug combination across a wide population group (Hirschler, Reuters, 12/11).