Tip Sheet Atlantic Edition

• Published in: Newsweek (International, Atlantic edition) p. 88
• Main Author: David Noonan With Mary Carmichael and Jennifer Barrett, Alexandra A. Seno, William Underhill, Barbie Nadeau, Mary Carmichael, Jonathan Darman, Raina Kelley
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Newsweek Publishing LLC 20.10.2003
• Edition: International ed.
• Subjects: Clooney, George; Goss, Paul
• ISSN: 0163-7053

  Health Breast Cancer's 'New Era' By David Noonan Breast-cancer patients deserve good news, and they got a nice helping of it last week when a large, international clinical trial was halted early because the drug being tested was found to dramatically reduce the risk of relapse. The findings for the drug, letrozole--manufactured by Novartis and sold under the brand name Femara--electrified researchers and prompted them to abort the double-blind study of 5,187 women with early-stage disease and offer the treatment to the 2,594 patients who had been receiving a placebo. "This is the beginning of a new era in breast-cancer therapy," says Dr. Paul Goss, of Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, who directed the project. Stopping such a big and important study is exceptional, but so were the results: letrozole reduced the risk of recurrence among older women by 43 percent. (Most of the 1 million women worldwide diagnosed with breast cancer each year are postmenopausal.) Goss and his colleagues in the United States and Europe were testing the drug as a follow-up treatment. The women in the letrozole study had recently completed (after surgery) the standard five-year course of tamoxifen, a powerful and widely used drug that eventually loses its effectiveness as, researchers believe, tumors become resistant to it. Until now, breast-cancer patients who finished tamoxifen treatment could only wait and hope that their cancer wouldn't recur- -which it does, within five years, in up to 20 percent of such cases. Letrozole, previously approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for advanced breast cancer, and readily available, offers an exciting new option for extending treatment of early- stage disease. "If it raises my chances even 1 percent, I say sign me up," says Debbie Lloret, 46, a New York City mother and breast- cancer survivor who has undergone two lumpectomies, a mastectomy, chemotherapy and is currently in her third year of tamoxifen. "I am so excited about this I can't even tell you." Letrozole, like tamoxifen, works by interfering with the hormone estrogen, which feeds some breast-cancer cells; tamoxifen blocks estrogen receptors on the cells, while letrozole inhibits the creation of estrogen. (Letrozole is not effective when given alone to premenopausal women who ovulate, because they produce much more estrogen than postmenopausal women.)