Promising News Released On Treating Breast Cancer

PALO ALTO (KCBS) – There is some new hope in treating an aggressive form of breast cancer.

"This is a subgroup of breast cancer that's particularly difficult to treat," said Stanford researcher Dr. Jim Ford, who said triple negative breast cancer makes up 15-20 percent of overall breast cancer cases, tending to strike younger women and women of color.

He said it doesn't respond to the newer therapies that have offered so much hope for other types of cancer, which makes the news about iniparib that much more exciting.

KCBS' Patti Resing Reports:

A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that it extended women's lives.

"The average survival of these women, who had recurrent cancer that had been treated with many other drugs, extended their survival from an average of about seven months to more than 12 months," said Ford.

The drug is part of a larger class of anti-cancer agents that work by preventing cancer cells from repairing themselves. Ford said it's a perfect example of what's known as personalized oncology, as they try to direct therapies to cancers based on some of their molecular characteristics.

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