"The lack of options for advanced breast cancer has created a sense of urgency for high-quality research and clinical trials to address a multitude of unanswered questions, a guideline panel concluded.
"Though treatment advances have extended the duration of survival, advanced breast cancer remains almost uniformly fatal. Consequently, the principal goals have been to improve the length and quality of life for patients.
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"In part, the lack of progress can be traced to the inherently slow pace of clinical development, said guideline co-chair Fatima Cardoso, MD, of the Champalimaud Cancer Center in Lisbon, Portugal. The traditional approach to clinical research has been to begin with patients who have metastatic breast cancer and then move the evaluation of promising therapies to earlier stages, effectively ending research in patients with advanced disease.
"In one sense, this is correct because we need to provide the highest number of patients as early as possible with the new drugs," Cardoso said in a statement. "But if we do that all the time, we will leave the metastatic patients without any good knowledge of how to treat them."
Entire article here: http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOn…/BreastCancer/48627