A new class of drugs will change the way breast cancer is treated, significantly reducing the recurrence of breast cancer in post-menopausal women who have completed the normal regimen of surgery and chemotherapy, an international team reported Thursday.
The new drugs, called aromatase inhibitors, could improve the survival of as many as half of the 213,000 American women who contract breast cancer each year.
One of the new drugs, letrozole, proved so effective in women who had already finished a five-year regimen of the drug tamoxifen that the study was halted prematurely and the results released on the Internet before their publication next month in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Among breast cancer survivors who have completed five years of prophylactic therapy with tamoxifen, the risk of recurrence is normally about 1 percent to 2 percent a year. Letrozole, sold under the brand name Femara by Novartis Inc., reduced recurrence by 43 percent.
"This is going to change the way we treat breast cancer," said Dr. James Doroshow of the City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. "There are hundreds of thousands of women who could potentially benefit."
The aromatase inhibitors were designed to block the body’s production of estrogen and thereby prevent the hormone from stimulating tumor growth. In the new study, for example, circulating levels of estrogen were reduced by 95 percent.
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