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December 13, 2009

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More life hope for cancer drug

US researchers may have found a way to overcome resistance to hormone-blocking breast cancer drugs, extending the life of treatments that keep the disease in check.

They said the drug Nexavar, or sorafenib, made by German drug maker Bayer and its development partner Onyx Pharmaceuticals, helped re-sensitize breast cancer to treatment with aromatase inhibitors, drugs given to post-menopausal women with hormone-sensitive breast cancers.

"Hormone-receptor positive breast cancers eventually become resistant to hormonal therapy," said Dr Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University in Washington, who presented her findings at the American Association for Cancer Research's San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

"There has been a great deal of interest in trying to figure out how we might overcome that resistance or stop the cancer cells from figuring out how to circumvent that hormonal therapy," Isaacs said.

She said Nexavar, a drug approved for liver and kidney cancer, acts on a lot of cancer-related genes and it also acts to inhibit new blood vessels from forming.

The researchers studied the drug in 35 post-menopausal women with advanced breast cancer resistant to treatment with aromatase inhibitors.





 

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