UCLA breast cancer research leads to Ibrance drug FDA approval

Richard Finn transferred to UCLA as an undergraduate freshman from UC San Diego in the late 1970s to be closer to home after his mother died of breast cancer when he was a college freshman.

Finn’s mother’s death made him want to go into cancer research. He went to find a research position at Dennis Slamon’s office after hearing about Slamon’s recent breakthrough in breast cancer research at UCLA. He has been working with Slamon since.

The two researchers’ drug Ibrance, a pill that treats breast cancer, recently received expedited approval from the Food and Drug Administration and was classified as a breakthrough therapy. The two have been researching it since 2007.

Researchers have enrolled 165 postmenopausal women in phase 2 clinical trials, which are used to study a drug’s effectiveness, for Ibrance over the past few years. One of those women is Gloria Zollar.

Zollar, 78, has now been taking the drug for four years to treat her breast cancer. Zollar was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 and received both chemotherapy and radiation therapy to limit the spread of the cancer until 2004, when she went into remission before finding out in 2007 that the cancer had spread to the bones in her rib cage.

It was then that her oncologist suggested she enroll in the clinical trial for Ibrance. As part of the trial, Zollar took the medication for 21 days every month and has been on the medication ever since. Four years later, she is in remission.

“(Ibrance) has given me a positive attitude about life,” Zollar said. “I take care of myself. I mean I do my own laundry, I drive my own car, I even play golf twice a week.”

The drug had been around for years but was unplaced and unused in Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, and had never been matched to breast cancer before, Finn said. He added that the major challenge he and Slamon faced was figuring out which disease the drug could treat.

“Breast cancer cells use alternate proteins to escape hormonal blockades and cause cell division, and this drug is blocking this specific pathway,” Slamon said.

The drug does not attack healthy cells and therefore will not make hair fall out or cause other side effects common to treatments like chemotherapy, Slamon said.

Slamon added that for all cancers, there is typically a time period of control before the cancer spreads to other parts of the body and the patient is relatively safe and healthy.

“This time doubled (during clinical research for Ibrance), going from about 10 months for the alternative treatment to 20 months with Ibrance,” Slamon said. “It’s been four or five decades since we’ve seen this big of a difference.”

The clinical trial did not start out by seeking FDA approval, but only to complete lab-based research. However, after obtaining the research results, the FDA gave the drug the greenlight for expedited approval, Finn said. Ibrance will be available to all those suffering from breast cancer and can currently be prescribed by doctors, he added.

Studies are still ongoing for this drug, Slamon said. The same researchers who developed the drug are now working to create similar treatments for other types of cancer, including lung, pancreas, prostate and others, he said.