Word: herceptin
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...Herceptin is only a beginning, says UCLA's Slamon, who identified the HER2 receptor. There are bound to be other cancer proteins that pharmaceutical manufacturers can use as targets as they develop new, more selective drugs. "Using a combination of [these kinds of] therapies earlier in the disease could have a dramatic impact on outcomes," Slamon says...
Ideally, Singletary would like to be able to tailor each woman's treatment to the characteristics of her particular tumor. Already scientists have identified a biological marker called the HER2 receptor, whose presence usually signifies a very aggressive cancer. For the past four years, a drug called Herceptin has been given to women with metastatic tumors that make a lot of the HER2 protein. Now trials are being conducted to see if Herceptin, which may have some deleterious effects on the heart, will nonetheless help other women with smaller tumors that haven't yet spread...
...development of the first commercial medical treatment, human insulin for diabetes, produced through recombinant dna technology. Since then Ullrich has been on a quest to battle cancer by concentrating on signal transduction, a means of communication between cells in the human body. From this work came the drug Herceptin, the first treatment to aim at the cells that cause breast cancer. Ullrich's approach is not to target the cancer cell itself but to block the mechanism that attracts blood vessels from healthy tissue to feed a tumor...
That proved far too strong a claim, but monoclonal antibodies have finally begun to live up to more modest expectations. Rituxan was the first, but just a year later, the same approach led to Herceptin, a drug that keeps growth factors from feeding certain kinds of breast-cancer cells. Such targeted treatments are effective only when the appropriate target exists. Herceptin, for example, latches onto a receptor known as HER2, which is abnormally abundant in only about 30% of breast-cancer tumors. A biopsy can tell doctors whether a patient is likely to respond to Herceptin, but they'd hoped...
...leaves normal cells alone. Like all antibodies, these man-made cancer missiles seek out particular receptors--molecules on the cancer cell's surface that help the cell recognize and react to nearby enzymes and proteins. Almost a dozen such drugs are already on the market, including one called Herceptin. It zeroes in on the HER-2/neu receptor that sits on the surface of some breast-cancer cells, blocking the binding of growth factors. For the 30% of tumors involving the receptor, the drug may be helpful...