Adding the chemotherapy drug carboplatin and/or the antibody therapy bevacizumab to standard presurgery chemotherapy increased the number of women with triple-negative breast cancer who had no residual cancer detected at surgery, according to results of a randomized, phase II clinical trial presented at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

An increasing number of patients with triple-negative breast cancer are receiving chemotherapy before surgery, a treatment approach called neoadjuvant chemotherapy. In about one-third of these patients, no identifiable cancer cells are found in breast tissue and lymph nodes removed at surgery performed after the neoadjuvant chemotherapy. These patients are said to have had a pathologic complete response and have a much lower risk of cancer recurrence compared with patients whose cancers do not respond this well to the neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

“Our study was designed to find out if adding either carboplatin or bevacizumab to standard preoperative chemotherapy would increase the percentage of patients in whom cancer is eliminated before surgery,” said William M. Sikov, M.D., F.A.C.P., associate professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, R.I. “We are excited to report that adding either therapy significantly increased the percentage of patients in whom cancer was eliminated from the breast, and that adding both was even more effective.

“While our results show increases in pathologic complete response rates with both carboplatin and bevacizumab, we do not yet know how large an impact, if any, these differences will have on cancer recurrences or deaths. Although the study is not large enough to detect significant differences in these endpoints, we plan to follow patients for 10 years after their surgery to see if patient outcomes suggest long-term benefits from the investigational treatments.”  Click here (http://www.hopkinsbreastcenter.org/artemis/201401/14.html) to read the rest.

The above was taken from an e-mailed article sent through the Pink Ribbon Cowgirls.