The role of Avastin for women with different kinds of advanced breast cancer who are receiving other treatments is not yet known. For example, no women in the E2100 trial with HER2-positive cancer were currently taking Herceptin (chemical name: trastuzumab). (They had either already taken Herceptin or couldn't take it.) So we just don't know yet if women who are taking Herceptin would benefit from Avastin.
Women with advanced breast cancer who have already had chemotherapy may also be wondering if Avastin could help them. The answer to that isn't known either.
If you have advanced breast cancer and have not received chemotherapy for your condition, you may want to talk to your doctor about Avastin as an option for you after the FDA approves its use in this way.
Avastin may cause high blood pressure, nose bleeds, and extra protein in the urine. In studies of colon cancer, people receiving Avastin had a slightly higher risk of stroke and heart problems. If you already have any of these conditions or are at high risk for them, talk to your doctor about how Avastin may affect them.
You may also be wondering how you will pay for Avastin if you don't have insurance, or whether your insurance carrier will cover Avastin when it becomes available. Genentech, the company that makes Avastin, has established an Access to Care Foundation that helps uninsured or under-insured people get access to treatments. You can call the Foundation at 800-530-3083. Genentech also has a help line for people with insurance who have reimbursement problems: 888-249-4918.
It's important to note that we don't yet have a lot of information about how Avastin might influence women's survival. However, the early results are encouraging. Women who received Avastin plus Taxol survived longer than those who received Taxol alone.
Stay tuned to Breastcancer.org for the very latest information on Avastin, what other types of medicines it works well with, and other promising treatments for advanced breast cancer.
The February 2006 Research News section was made possible by an unrestricted educational grant from Genentech BioOncology.
Reviewed study: "Avastin Given with Taxol Slows Advanced Breast Cancer" by K. D. Miller and others, San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, December 8, 2005, Abstract 3
Is this for me? If you have advanced (metastatic) breast cancer — cancer that has spread from the breast to another part of the body — and are looking for promising new medicines that can work well with chemotherapy, you might want to read this article.
Background and importance of the study: Medicines that choke off the blood supply to cancer cells are known as antiangiogenesis medications. Anti means "in opposition to," angio means "blood vessel," and genesis means "beginning." Antiangiogenesis medicines have been shown to help people with advanced colon cancer live longer (improve survival) without the disease progressing, and also to help people live longer whether the cancer progresses or not (improve overall survival).
Avastin (chemical name: bevacizumab) is an antiangiogenesis medicine that has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat advanced cancer of the colon or rectum when combined with chemotherapy.
Researchers have studied Avastin as a treatment for women with advanced breast cancer (cancer that has spread from the breast to another part of the body). The Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group presented results of that research, called Trial E2100, at both the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting and the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in 2005. They found that women who received Avastin plus the chemotherapy drug Taxol (chemical name: paclitaxel) had a longer time before their cancer worsened than women who got only Taxol. Compared to Taxol alone, Avastin plus Taxol reduced the risk of the cancer progressing by 50%.
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