From the June 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 1 comments

New Breast Cancer Treatments Help Sufferers Gain Ground ( Preview )

The newest targeted therapies are helping doctors to tailor increasingly effective treatments to individual patients

By Francisco J. Esteva and Gabriel N. Hortobagyi

Key Concepts

Breast cancer survival rates have been steadily climbing in North America and Europe, thanks to increased early detection and novel treatment options.
Many new treatments target specific molecules on tumor cells, allowing doctors to tailor medication to an individual patient’s tumor profile.
Breast cancer was the first solid-tumor type for which molecular-targeted therapy became available, and the success of the approach promises further dramatic advances.

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Breast Cancer Treatment Milestones
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Tumor Pathways
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Targeted Therapies

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Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed malignancy among women and, after lung cancer, the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in North America. Yet unlike the survival rate for individuals diagnosed with lung cancer, the rate for women diagnosed with breast cancer has been rising dramatically over the past decade—to the point where breast cancer could soon lose its ranking as the second-greatest cancer killer. Nothing would delight clinicians like us more.

This improvement in overall outlook for women diagnosed with breast cancer is attributable in part to earlier detection, which results from greater awareness of, and access to, regular breast screening. But breast cancer patients are also benefiting from accelerated research that has led to a much better understanding of the disease and a wider variety of treatment choices that doctors can mix and match to tailor therapy for a particular patient. In just the past decade, it has even become possible to target drugs to specific molecules within tumors that help to drive the disease.

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