Breast Cancer Cocktail Buys More Than a Year of Life – NBC News.com

Breast Cancer Cocktail Buys More Than a Year of Life – NBC News.com.

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ocktail of three breast cancer drugs buys patients an extra 16 months of life — a good news story so unusual, doctors have rushed to make it standard therapy, researchers said Wednesday.

The combination includes two so-called magic bullet drugs plus standard chemotherapy. It helps patients with advanced HER-2 positive breast cancer — a hard-to-treat type that’s more often than not a death sentence.

“I can’t think of something that improves survival by this much. Often, we debate over changing practice for something that extends survival by a few months, so 15.7 months that is so impressive. And really that’s exactly what I see in the clinic,” says Dr. Jennifer Keating Litton of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She was not involved in the trial.