Mayo Clinic Researchers Say Triple Drug Combination is Promising Option

rom PRNewswire -- Combining two chemotherapy drugs with trastuzumab (Herceptin) to treat women who have metastatic HER2+ breast cancer may offer physicians another choice in their treatment options.

At the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), researchers from the Mayo Clinic campus in Florida report that using a combination of capecitabine, vinorelbine, and trastuzumab offers a treatment opiton that is at least as beneficial as other current options - and doesn't cause hair loss in patients.

The clinical trial is the first in the U.S. to study this particular combination of therapies in patients with HER2+ metastatic breast cancer, researchers say. The chemotherapy regimen was previously tested in Europe and demostrated good anti-tumor activity and low toxicity, so Mayo researchers combined it with Herceptin, says the study's lead author, Winston Tan, M.D., a medical oncologist at Mayo Clinic.

Sixty-seven percent of the 45 patients in this trial responded to treatment, with their tumors decreasing in size by at least 30 percent. Historic response to conventional drug regimens (one chemotherapy drug with Herceptin) that are currently used to treat metastatic HER2+ breast cancer is about 50 percent, Dr. Tan noted.

For more details, visit the Mayo Clinic website.

June 1, 2009