New hope in treatment of aggressive breast cancer

VICTORIAN researchers have offered hope to women suffering from an aggressive type of breast cancer with a promising new treatment.

Julia Manovska says it’s fantastic that more promising treatments were in the pipeline. Picture: Kylie Else

PIGGY-BACKING chemotherapy with two drugs that fire up the body’s immune system, “completely arrests” the growth of tumours in an aggressive form of breast cancer.

The new finding by Victorian researchers offers hope to carriers of a faulty gene with triple negative breast cancer that a more effective treatment is on the horizon.

Women who carry mutations in the BRCA1 gene are at a higher risk of developing ovarian and breast cancer, in particular triple negative breast cancer.

Dr Daniel Gray, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, said this form of breast cancer doesn’t have three receptors commonly found on breast cancer cells, making many drugs ineffective.

Their study, completed in partnership with Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre researchers, was carried out in the laboratory using human tumours.

They found that the two immunotherapy drugs — anti-PD1 and anti-CTLA4 — in conjunction with standard chemotherapy stopped the growth of tumours.

“The combination of the two drugs and chemotherapy completely arrested the growth of the tumours,” Dr Gray said.

Associate Professor Sherene Loi, Dr Daniel Gray and Professor Geoff Lindeman. Picture: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

“It’s a new treatment paradigm and we are really excited and pleased by these results.”

He said immunotherapy drugs take advantage of the ‘brakes’ built into immune cells that prevent them from attacking their own tissues, but some cancers hijack the brakes allowing the cancer to evade the immune system.

Immunotherapy releases the brakes, boosting the immune system so it can attack the cancer.

This new class of anti-cancer drugs had been a ‘game changer’ for melanoma and lung cancer, but hadn’t shown any promise in breast cancer, said Professor Geoff Lindeman, who is also an oncologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter Mac.

“Our hope would be that we can combine two types of immunotherapy with chemotherapy to more effectively treat breast cancer for women who have a faulty BRCA1 gene and develop clinically aggressive breast cancers.”

Peter Mac’s Associate Professor Sherene Loi said their study provide compelling evidence to take this combination of drugs into human trials.

Breast cancer survivor Julia Manovska had five members of her family die from cancer and found out she carried the BRCA1 mutation in 2011.

“I thought I had plenty of time, two years later I was diagnosed with early but aggressive breast cancer,” she said.

The 47 year old had her ovaries and breasts removed, and underwent chemotherapy and hormone treatment.

While she did not have triple negative breast cancer, she said it was fantastic that more promising treatments were in the pipeline for this group of women.

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