Interview
with Neil Love, MD from Breast Cancer Update for Medical Oncologists,
Program 1 2000
Play
Audio Below:
I
think that’s a very interesting and exciting area. In the limited
studies which are done in ER-positive, postmenopausal women –
which I think one was presented at ASCO – which it showed a
very high degree of anti-tumor activity in patients treated with
neoadjuvant anastrozole. And it showed dramatic reduction, almost
like 70% or 80% of the patients showing objective shrinkage of the
disease and the other thing was that number of these patients who
were technically in the beginning , operable, but they were not
candidate for breast preservation, more than, I think close to two-third
of the women become candidate for breast preservation by just a
short period of like four months of the therapy with anastrozole.
Instead of giving the drug blindly after local therapy for years,
and hoping that it will do good – this way you can find out
in a couple of months whether your drug is going to have any favorable
impact or not. Because the degree of down-staging which we achieve
with the neoadjuvant therapy – like a patient who starts with
a Stage 3A or 3B disease if you can down stage that patient to stage
1, that patient is going to behave de novo as Stage 1, not
behave like a Stage 3. So you can tell which subset of patients
your therapy is going to have an impact. There is lot of data for
chemotherapy, and I am sure that similar data, if it is collected,
with an endocrine agent it will be the same.
Relevant
Articles:
ARIMIDEX'
as Neoadjuvant Therapy Causes Large Reductions inTumour Volume in
Postmenopausal Women with Large Operable Breast Cancers. (Meeting
abstract). Dixon Michael. Renshaw L. Bellamy C. Cameron DA.
Miller WR. Proc Annu Meet Am Soc Clin Oncol. 18:A345, 1999.
Neoadjuvant
Treatment with Anastrozole ('ARIMIDEX') Causes Profound Suppression
of Intra-Tumor Estrogen Levels (Meeting abstract). Geisler Jurge.
Bernsten H. Ottestad L. Lindtjorn B. Dowsett M. Lonning PE. Proc
Annu Meet Am Soc Clin Oncol 18:A311, 1999.
