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The fact that 52% responded with an additional 38% experiencing stable disease is truly remarkable in the setting of metastatic disease--that amounts to 90% of patients not progressing while on the combination!!!! So obviously herceptin is making a great difference and doxil is a good combination with it(and it is even possible to take doxil without terrible cardiotoxicity in patients who previously were treated with an anthracycline--usually toxicity is dose-related and there is a life-time limit to how much anthracycline that can be given according to the papers I have read.
When no effective treatment is given, the average life expectancy of her2 positive breast cancer patients is 1 year after distant recurrence (from Dr. Slamon's talks) yet these patients had an average 12 month progression free survival (at a mean 13.5 months into the study--as the study continues with longer follow-up those that are doing well may scewed the results into even longer progression free survival figures) and they had not yet reached median overall survival (as people were living sufficiently longer that not enough of them had died during the study to come up with figures!!!!
Why would the researchers do a study of doxil with and without herceptin at this time, when all studies in Europe with HERA which allowed "any reasonable chemotherapy regimen" plus Herceptin (and there was quite a variety of them!) showed the recurrence rate to be about 50% less with Herceptin than without?
I am certain that if the results of studies of doxil were equally good (90% of patients were either improved or stable) there would have been lots of news stories about it. Feel free to look up any doxil monotherapy articles and let me know...
Hope this helped!
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