New drug may help women with hereditary breast cancer

02. 06. 2009 | Cancer Research UK


A small clinical trial of a new drug designed to treat hereditary breast cancer has achieved promising results, UK scientists have said.

New drug may help women with hereditary breast cancer

Image credit: shutterstock.com

The scientists recruited 54 women from the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, all of whom had previously received chemotherapy for advanced breast cancer, and who carried faulty copies of the BRCA1 or 2 genes.

Half of the patients were given 100mg doses of a new drug called olaparib, while the other half received 400mg doses of the drug.

Olaparib is one in a class of drugs known as 'PARP inhibitors' and was designed to treat breast cancer in women with faulty BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, which account for around five per cent of cases of the disease.

Read the whole article at Cancer Research UK

Reference

  1. Fong PC, Boss DS, et al. Inhibition of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase in tumors from BRCA mutation carriers. The New England Journal of Medicine 2009; 361(2): 123–134. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa0900212

Keywords: hereditary breast cancer, PARP inhibitors, olaparib

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