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As an advocacy website, we support all research and drug development that will help breast cancer patients survive. In order to fulfill our obligation we will soon be expanding our web site to include an Emerging Technologies and Clinical Trials Section. This will be similar to our Metastatic Brain Tumor section which we launched last year.
We had an opportunity to talk to many representatives of pharmaceutical and testing companies during our recent visit to San Antonio.
They all expressed a need for bc survivors to be involved in research. In that respect there will soon be two international large scale studies underway.
The first will be a survey of all bc patients who were or are being treated by Herceptin. This will probably be in the form of a questionaire or phone interview. As in any large scale study, the accuracy will depend on the number of participants.
The second and even more monumentous study will be the genetic mapping of all available breast cancer tissues. This study will map over 44,000 different genes. Please check with the pathology department of where your slides were studied and see if they have retained any samples (usually in parafin blocks. Don't do anything yet, just try and find out if they still exist.
In our case, this may discover the reason why only 25% of all HER2+++ women respond to Herceptin and may lead to a genetic "fix" to aid the other 75%.
I believe we are on the treshold of a new era. There are already 3 vaccine studies underway to find a vaccine for HER2+++ and we are in contact with all 3 scientists who are overseeing each project.
A research scientist from a major drug company told me in San Antonio that the survival rate of HER2+++ stage IV metastatic breast cancer patients now exceeds the rate of HER2- patients.
Being HER2+++ is not the automatic death sentence that it once was.
Keep the successes going !!!
Hugs
Christine
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