Drugs designed to target HER2-postive breast cancer could also benefit some patients with bile duct cancer, according to results of a patient trial to be presented on Thursday at the 36th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Barcelona, Spain. Bile duct cancer is rare, treatment options are limited, and the survival rates are low. The trial also suggests that a wider group of breast cancer patients – those with HER2-mutated breast cancer – could be treated with these drugs.
In the trial, researchers used a combination of tucatinib and trastuzumab to treat patients with a variety of different tumors, all of which had signs of changes to a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). The research was presented by Dr.Yoshiaki Nakamura from the National Cancer Center Hospital East, Kashiwa, Japan.
The phase II trial included 217 patients from Europe, the USA, Japan and South Korea with various different types of tumors that either had unusually high levels of HER2 expression or alterations in HER2. Despite previous treatment, all the patients had tumors that had spread within the body (metastatic cancer). Patients on the trial received 21-day cycles of tucatinib tablets twice every day and trastuzumab intravenously once every three weeks.
Tucatinib and trastuzumab are drugs that have been designed to stop cancer cells from growing by targeting HER2. Because these treatments specifically target cancer cells, they can have f.