Women who have a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer reap significant benefits when their treatment includes a one-year course of the drug Herceptin. In international and North American trials, the intravenous drug cut the risk of recurrence of disease by half and markedly improved survival, according to a report in the Oct. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Since these results were first reported last spring at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, breast cancer oncologists have altered the way they treat early-stage HER2-positive breast cancers.
