He said: "This novel and targeted approach has shown that we are now able to stop the cancer in its tracks while reducing many of the common side effects normally associated with standard chemotherapy treatment."
The trial results, presented at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress conference in Stockholm, also showed far fewer side-effects suffered by those given the new treatment.
While two thirds of those given standard treatment suffered hair loss, as a result of chemotherapy, less than five per cent of the women given T-DM1 lost their hair.
Half as many of the most serious side effects, requiring hospitalisation, were reported among those given the new treatment.
Cancer Research UK said targeted treatments which avoided damage to healthy cells were vital to improve survival, but said larger scale trials were needed to test the drug's potential.
Nell Barrie, senior science information officer, said: "This approach combines two effective treatments but until we have results from larger, longer term trials we won't know for sure how beneficial this could be for patients with this particular type of breast cancer."
Around 10,000 women in Britain are diagnosed with HER2-positive cancer each year, making up around 20 to 30 per cent of all breast cancer cases.
The diagnosis means women have been found to have large quantities of a protein known as HER2 on the surface of the tumour cells, which makes the disease more aggressive.
In recent years, Herceptin, which targets this protein, had been hailed as the best solution for such women.
The new trial appears to show that the addition of the antibody DM1 prevents the cell division which spreads cancer.
The combination drug is not yet licensed, and could take three to five years to be available in this country.
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