A trial of doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide and either ixabepilone or paclitaxel as chemotherapy before surgery for early stage breast cancer (CA163100)

This trial was looking at chemotherapy with doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide followed by ixabepilone or paclitaxel before surgery for breast cancer.

Doctors usually treat early stage breast cancer with surgery. Some women have chemotherapy before surgery. This is called neoadjuvant treatment. It can shrink the cancer in the breast and may mean that you can have surgery to remove just the cancer instead of having the whole breast removed (mastectomy).

Two chemotherapy drugs doctors often use are doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide. In this trial, they looked at adding a third drug. This was either paclitaxel or ixabepilone.

Paclitaxel was a drug that doctors could already use to treat breast cancer. Ixabepilone was a new chemotherapy drug. It works in a similar way to paclitaxel and had already been used in clinical trials for more advanced breast cancer.

The aims of this trial were to

• See how well ixabepilone worked compared to paclitaxel, following doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide before surgery for early breast cancer

• Try and find out if there are genes or proteins that can show which breast cancers are likely to respond better to ixabepilone