Shanghai medical experts make new breast cancer finding

Shanghai medical experts have found a new treatment method that has been proven to prolong the disease progression-free survival of patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, the most dangerous type of breast cancer.

During the "Future-Super" clinical trial conducted over more than two years, experts found that the combination of chemotherapy and targeted therapy, or immunotherapy, significantly prolonged the progression-free survival of patients.

This new finding may provide a new strategy for tackling the major clinical challenges that the existing treatment method face, said the researchers from the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center.

A paper about the research results was published on the website of The Lancet Oncology, an international oncology journal, on Tuesday. The center said that the research, which was led by professors Shao Zhimin, Wang Zhonghua, Jiang Yizhou, and Fan Lei, can be considered a landmark achievement in the integration of the pharmaceutical industry and medical institutions.

This multi-cohort, randomized, phase-II clinical trial was jointly conducted by the breast surgery department of the hospital and Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals Co Ltd.

Trial participants were divided randomly into two groups to receive traditional chemotherapy or chemotherapy combined with a molecular targeted anti-tumor drug or a PD-1 injection.

The research findings showed that the median progression-free survival of patients in the precision therapy group was 11.3 months, which was 5.5 months longer than that of their counterparts in the conventional chemotherapy group, during the median follow-up period of 22.5 months.

Notably, the progression-free survival rate of patients they had categorized as immune-modulation increased the most -- their median progression-free survival reached 15.1 months, which was 8.6 months longer than traditional chemotherapy and is currently the best survival rate in the world.