A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I can only imagine how many people are overjoyed by this news:

Women who have a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer reap significant benefits when their treatment includes a one-year course of the drug Herceptin.

In international and North American trials, the intravenous drug cut the risk of recurrence of disease by half and markedly improved survival, according to a report in the Oct. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Since these results were first reported last spring at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, breast cancer oncologists have altered the way they treat early-stage HER2-positive breast cancers.

"Herceptin is now being incorporated in the treatment regimen," said Dr. Larry Norton, deputy physician-in-chief for Breast Cancer Programs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. "The big change is the application of the drug earlier on in the disease."

Dr. Harold J. Burstein, assistant professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said the studies make it clear that women who have HER2-positive breast cancers should consider using this drug. "Women with this kind of breast cancer get dramatic benefit from adding Herceptin to chemotherapy," he said.

HER2-positive breast cancers occur when the body makes too many copies of the "human epidermal growth factor receptor 2" gene and, as a consequence, produces an excess amount of the HER2 protein on the surface of cancer cells. These two actions lead to the particularly aggressive growth and proliferation of these tumors, Burstein explained.

Herceptin, also known as trastuzumab, works by halting the growth of those cancer cells. It is currently approved for the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.

As with all such remarkable breakthroughs, it is worth reminding the populace that future such breakthroughs will become difficult--if not impossible--to achieve should the vilification of pharmaceutical companies continue and should policies that are commensurate with that vilification be instituted.