
“Deborah agreed to take part in a trial as she was keen to help other cancer patients in the future. "If taking part in a trial means others might be helped then I’m very happy with that."
This trial looked at lapatinib, trastuzumab and chemotherapy before surgery for breast cancer. The trial was for women who have HER2 positive breast cancer. This means the cancer has large amounts of a protein called .
If your breast cancer has spread into the surrounding tissue (is ), is inflammatory breast cancer or you have a large tumour, you may have chemotherapy before surgery. If your breast cancer is also HER2 positive you may have trastuzumab (Herceptin) before surgery. Although this works well doctors are always looking for ways to improve treatment.
One combination of chemotherapy that doctors use is fluorouracil (5FU), epirubicin and cyclophosphamide (this is called FEC). Docetaxel is another chemotherapy drug that doctors can use. If breast cancer cells produce large amounts of a protein called HER2 doctors can use biological therapies such as trastuzumab, which target HER2.
In this trial, doctors looked at trastuzumab and another drug called lapatinib alongside standard docetaxel and FEC chemotherapy. Lapatinib is another type of biological therapy. It is a cancer growth blocker. It stops signals that cancer cells use to divide and grow. We know from research that it may help to treat breast cancers that don’t respond to trastuzumab.
In this trial, women had a combination of docetaxel, trastuzumab and lapatinib followed by FEC before surgery.
The aims of this trial were to
The researchers found that having both trastuzumab and lapatinib alongside docetaxel worked better than having docetaxel with either trastuzumab or lapatinib before surgery.
128 women took part in this trial. Of those,
The researchers looked at how well the treatment worked from the results for 122 women. They looked at whose cancer had gone away completely in the breast. They found this was
They also looked at whose cancer had gone away completely in the breast and . This was
Women who had both trastuzumab and lapatinib had more side effects. These included diarrhoea and liver problems.
The trial team found that having both lapatinib and trastuzumab alongside docetaxel chemotherapy and before FEC helped women with HER2 positive breast cancer before surgery.
We have based this summary on information from the research team. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists () and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the research team. We have not analysed the data ourselves.
Please note: In order to join a trial you will need to discuss it with your doctor, unless otherwise specified.
Prof David Cameron
European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC)
Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC)
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
NIHR Clinical Research Network: Cancer
Freephone 0808 800 4040
“Deborah agreed to take part in a trial as she was keen to help other cancer patients in the future. "If taking part in a trial means others might be helped then I’m very happy with that."