Delyth Morgan, chief executive of Breast Cancer Campaign, said, ?Historically, women with HER2-positive breast cancer had few treatments available to them. Herceptin changed that and is arguably one of the biggest advances in breast cancer in the last 20 years.
About 48,000 women in Britain develop breast cancer each year and many still die, despite improved screening and treatment in recent years.
Around a quarter of sufferers have quickly-growing tumours which are known as HER2-positive because of the large numbers of receptors they have for a particular protein.
Many have benefited over the past decade from the development of Herceptin (trastuzumab), which stops cancer cells dividing and growing, but some women develop resistance to the drug.
In a new paper, published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, Jacek Capala at the National Cancer Institute in Philadelphia and colleagues describe their attempts to find a new way to target HER2-positive tumours.
They say Affitoxin kills cancer cells by delivering a bacterial toxin straight to them, and in trials where it was injected into mice even ?relatively large, aggressive tumours stopped growing and most of them disappeared?.
?Herceptin has revolutionized the treatment of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, but a significant number of tumours acquire resistance to the drug,? said Dr Capala. ?Affitoxin could offer another therapeutic option for those patients whose tumours no longer respond to Herceptin.?
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