Herceptin cancer treatment with

G. Other applications Herceptin has been combined with cisplatin in the treatment of heavily pretreated metastatic breast cancer. Treatment of patients with ovarian cancer is under investigation. A recent study demonstrated that Herceptin increased the clinical benefits of first-line chemotherapy—doxorubicin (or epiru-bicin) and cyclophosphamide or pacli-taxel—in metastatic breast cancer that overexpressed HER2. 

Like patients with breast carcinoma, those with ovarian cancer may benefit from treatment with Herceptin in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs. Herceptin treatment is effective, in both early and advanced stages of ovarian cancer (when the majority of tumor cells express HER-2 protein), for eliminating the potentially more malignant HER-2-positive tumor cells. The effectiveness of Herceptin is based on the affinity of this monoclonal antibody for the extracellular domain of HER-2, which is common as ovarian carcinomas progress. However, a tumor vaccine inducing antibody and/or T-cell immunity to HER-2 epitopes will ultimately provide the most effective means to prevent the emergence of HER-2-positive cells. 

Rituxan reacts with the CD2 antigen found on B-cell lymphomas. Herceptin is reactive with a growth factor receptor called HER2/neu, which is selectively overexpressed by breast cancer cells in 30 percent of women and results in abnormal cell proliferation. Neither Herceptin nor Rituxan alone can cure cancer, but combining them with other treatments, such as chemotherapy, has shown great promise for some indications. 

The identification of targets with complete or nearly complete specificity is a key challenge. Herceptin , used in breast cancer treatment, binds the Her-2 receptor for epidermal growth factor (EGF). This receptor is present only in a subset of breast cancer patients, providing the specificity... 

Trastuzumab (Herceptin) is a humanized monoclonal antibody against the extracellular domain of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Treatment of cancer patients with trastuzumab has been associated with an increased incidence of cardiac toxicity including left ventricular cardiac dysfunction, arrhythmias, hypertension, disabling cardiac failure, cardiomyopathy, and cardiac death. Trastuzumab can also cause asymptomatic decline in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) (Herceptin PI 2010). 

Treatment of Her2/neu (EGFR2)-upregulated breast cancers with Herceptin... 

---