With 42 000 new cases per year, breast cancer is increasingly common. At the same time, the therapy is progressing and can maintain the anatomical women. Always a leader in this field for 60 years, the Institut Curie advance a new weapon to limit the uptake of the removal of the breast.
Breast cancer affects mostly young and active (half are under 61 years at diagnosis). For several years, advances in surgery have enabled the development of conservative treatment. Latest innovation, the taxanes used to limit the uptake of the removal of the breast.
Chemotherapy response to breast cancer
Faced with breast cancer, the treatment of choice is surgery. Based on early diagnosis, intervention may be limited to removal of the tumor while preserving the maximum mamma. This is referred to as lumpectomy. Today, advances in surgery can prevent most often use the complete removal of the breast (also called mammectomie). However, this operation is sometimes necessary to face large tumors, multiple tumors in one breast, scattered tumor cells or in case of recurrence after conservative treatment.
Allows radiation to destroy cancer cells remaining after surgery and reduce the risk of relapse. Chemotherapy may be used according to the same information (adjuvant chemotherapy). But they also placed before surgery to reduce the size of the tumor and allow a conservative (neo-adjuvant chemotherapy). Currently, the benchmark treatment in this indication is for breast cancer a combination of two molecules: doxorubicin / cyclophosphamide.
More breast conservation
Taxanes are molecules extracted from the yew, or bark (Taxol ®) or needle (Taxotere ®). These molecules are able to stop cell division, a property particularly attractive deal with cancer cells that have the particularity to grow in an anarchic way. Currently, they are used in advanced stages of breast cancer (metastatic breast carcinoma) and lung cancer. Taxol ® is also used to treat metastatic ovarian cancer.
But Dr Véronique Diéras, head of the Clinical Investigation Unit of the Institut Curie, wanted to study the effectiveness of Taxol ® (in combination with doxorubicin) compared to the combination of reference among 200 patients who can not receive conservative treatment. The results argue in favor of this new treatment. Paclitaxel administered before surgery (in combination with doxorubicin), reduces tumor size in 89% of patients against 70% with the combination of reference and allows a conservative treatment in 58% of patients against 45% . Finally, after an average follow-up of 31 months, the rate of disease-free survival was higher in the group treated with Taxol ® (91% against 70%)
To new indications for taxanes?
According to researchers, "this molecule, so far used in advanced stages of the disease, could in future be administered before surgery to reduce tumor size and increase the number of patients eligible for treatment Conservative. " Further studies will certainly confirm this benefit
