Correction: The original version of this article contained an error. Dr. Richard Finn’s name was misspelled.
As attention is drawn to the current progress of research during Breast Cancer Awareness month, UCLA medicine continues to pursue innovative breast cancer treatments.
“UCLA has a very long history and has really led the world in treatment of breast cancer,” said Dr. Richard Finn, a researcher with UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The research done at the center was crucial to the development of the drug Herceptin, one of the first targeted treatments for breast cancer, according to a UCLA statement.
Led by the research of Dr. Dennis Slamon in the late 1980s and 1990s, the center found the first proof of principle that mutations in a cancer cell could be found and fixed. Clinical trials for the drug were conducted at UCLA, and Herceptin was approved by the FDA in 1998.
Herceptin targets the HER2 receptors, which, in some breast cancer patients, are over-expressed and causes their breast cells to reproduce uncontrollably.
The conventional treatment for breast cancer patients includes surgical removal of the cancerous tumor from the breast. After the tumor has been removed, patients are often treated with radiation therapy, which destroys the remaining microscopic cancer cells, said Camelia Davtyan, doctor of internal medicine at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
Leading the clinical trials of Herceptin, UCLA medicine has helped change the face of breast cancer treatment with treatments designed to cater to the genetic makeup of the patient. Herceptin, along with conventional means of chemotherapy, can drastically increase the treatment’s effectiveness.
“That’s a relatively new concept to cancer medicine, because before the treatments were very much generic,” Finn said. “New treatments need to take into account the biology (of the patient).”
The Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center continues to pursue research in the treatment of breast cancer patients, innovating not only in the laboratory, but also in real-life clinical situations.
“The big paradigm that I think UCLA likes to put forwards is this idea of translational oncology,” Finn said. “Translational meaning taking laboratory observations to the clinic.”