In women with metastatic breast cancer, a new medicine doubles their chances of survival.

Trastuzumab is an example of inventiveness in the history of little incremental triumphs in the fight against cancer.

The new study was led by a team from the International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) in Barcelona. The country of Spain is depicted in this photograph.

The medication trastuzumab deruxtecan was investigated in the Destiny Breast-03 clinical study in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, a particularly aggressive subtype of malignant tumours that affects 20% of patients.

The medicine, dubbed a Trojan horse by the researchers, mixes a targeted drug (trastuzumab) with a chemotherapeutic treatment (deruxtecan). The first precisely hits the malignant cells, where the HER2 protein is produced, which is responsible for the tumor's rapid progression.

When compared to another similar combination, trastuzumab with emtansine, which is now the conventional treatment when patients with these cancers stop responding to the first line, the effects of this medicine showed significantly better results.

The study, which included 524 participants from 15 countries, found that 12 months after starting therapy, 75.8% of patients who received the novel combined managed disease progression-free survival, compared to 34.1 percent of those who received traditional treatment currently. According to a research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the percentage of patients living after one year of follow-up was 94.1 percent with trastuzumab deruxtecan against 85.9% with trastuzumab emtansine.

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The study's primary author, Javier Cortés, head of the International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) in Barcelona, also points out that "in 16 percent of cases, the illness vanishes," compared to 8.7% with standard treatment. Furthermore, "in heavily treated individuals," as Cortés adds, "who may develop increased resistance to new medications."

"The finding suggests that we're coming closer to the intended chronification of metastatic illness," he says. Now, a longer follow-up period will be required to see how many patients remain disease-free in the long run.

Although Joan Albanell, director of the Cancer Research Program at the IMIM-Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, was not involved in the study, he believes the findings show that "this drug far exceeds the efficacy of previous standard" and that "when it becomes available, it will become the new standard of practise clinic" for this type of tumour with metastasis when the initial treatment fails.

Before that, it must pass the European Medicines Agency's scrutiny process, which has already authorised it for those who have failed two previous lines of treatment, and, in the case of Spain, the state's finance agreements.