The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced through its official website the approval of a Pfizer drug to help treat women with advanced stages of breast cancer.
In a process known as accelerated approval, Ibrance, currently considered as one of the best-possible drugs for Pfizer by Wall Street, has just been approved for use a few months earlier than expected, on April 13.
According to the FDA, the sponsor, which is Pfizer, has shown through their clinical trials the significant contribution of the drug for treatment. Because of its potential huge role in preventing or treating life-threatening diseases, it moved on to priority review.
Ibrance, when commercially sold, will be used for treating women who are already in the advanced stages of breast cancer. This means that the cancer has already penetrated most of the breast tissue and has spread to other normal tissues.
Nevertheless, the drug is limited only to women who have gone through menopause and have been diagnosed with breast cancer characterized by estrogen receptor positive but don't carry the mutated HER2 gene that causes the uncontrollable production of cancer cells.
In one of the clinical trials performed by Pfizer with the help of University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), a breast cancer patient who takes Ibrance along with letrozole can keep her cancer at bay without any serious symptoms for more than 20 months.
However, for the drug to be truly effective, it should be taken along with letrozole. Letrozole alone has an effectiveness of around 10 months only. Other breast cancer patients today take tamoxifen.
How does the drug work? While letrozole prevents estrogen production, Ibrance blocks two kinds of enyzmes called CDK4 and CDK6. Both allow the cells, including those that are cancerous, to divide and thus multiply.
Recently, the FDA has approved an existing drug primarily used for treatment of attention-deficit disorder (ADD) for binge eating disorder.
