Researchers from Novartis Oncology have found that combining a kidney cancer drug with hormonal therapy doubles breast cancer patients’ survival.
They also found that by using the combination of therapies cancer progression risk was reduced by 57% in comparison to using hormonal therapy alone. The drug in question, everolimus, is typically used to treat renal cell carcinoma and is the first drug to exhibit an effect on women with advanced breast cancer when combined with hormonal therapy.
In a study on 724 patients the progression-free survival was raised to 6.9 months from the 2.8 months of women who were on hormonal therapy alone. The researchers are looking into the possibility of administering everolimus in conjunction with hormone therapy to treat advanced breast cancer.
