Have most of you seen this article?
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium:
The Failure of Targeted Therapies—So Far
by Musa Meyer
One of the disappointments at San Antonio this year was the overall failure of some targeted therapies to show much in the way of treatment benefit when given either alone or with chemotherapy drugs to unselected patients. Because of those and similar results, scientists are no longer looking at single genetic factors but are focusing instead on the “crosstalk” between genes (see the section titled “Understanding Hormonal Resistance” in our story “
The 25th Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium”).
Avastin (bevacizumab), also known as Anti-VEGF, is manufactured by Genentech and was recently studied for its effect on late-stage metastatic breast cancer. VEGF stands for vascular endothelial growth factor, a protein produced by one of the important genes that regulate angiogenesis, the process by which tumors create the blood supply they need to grow and thrive. In normal tissue VEGF is thought to be important in childhood development
and in healing wounds--[like h. pylori induced lesion ulcers perhaps??],
but in cancers that form solid tumors, angiogenesis is what enables tumors to get larger than the size of a small pea.
A phase III trial randomized 462 patients with metastatic breast cancer who had already received chemo (anthracycline and taxane) and gave them either the drug Xeloda (capecitabine) alone or Xeloda plus Avastin.
The results were disappointing.
Adding Avastin to Xeloda in heavily pretreated late-stage metastatic breast cancer patients had little effect. There were some treatment responses, but they didn’t translate into any clinical benefit in terms of increasing the time to disease progression or length of survival.
Trials are being done in first-line metastatic breast cancer with the hope that Avastin can be more effective with earlier stages of the disease.
Sorry, I just haven't seen Avastin helping any of the her-2 mets folks here either...that is just my take for what it is worth.
Gina