Breast cancer drug receives ’breakthrough therapy’ designation from FDA

An experimental drug being investigated for the treatment of advanced breast cancer by researchers from the Revlon/UCLA Women's Cancer Research Program at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center this week received "breakthrough therapy" designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In a clinical trial, patients with advanced breast cancer that was estrogen-receptor positive (ER+) and HER2-negative (HER2-), and who were given palbociclib (PD 0332991, Pfizer Inc.) in addition to the standard anti-estrogen treatment of letrozole had significantly higher progression-free survival — the length of time a patient is on treatment without tumor growth — than patients taking letrozole alone. Enacted as part of the 2012 FDA Safety and Innovation Act, the breakthrough therapy designation was created by the agency to expedite the development and review of a potential new medicine if it is "intended, alone or in combination with one or more other drugs, to treat a serious of life-threatening disease or condition and preliminary clinical evidence indicates that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over existing therapies on one or more clinically significant endpoints." Dr. Richard S. Finn, associate professor of medicine at the Jonsson Cancer Center, initially reported the phase 2 clinical data supporting the designation in December 2012 at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The clinical study was built on laboratory work from the Translational Oncology Research Laboratory directed by Dr. Dennis Slamon, professor of medicine at UCLA and director of the Jonsson Cancer Center's Revlon/UCLA Women's Cancer Research Program.