Dr. Piccart on the Success of Trastuzumab

Martine Piccart, MD, PhD, director of medicine at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium, discusses the success of trastuzumab for the treatment of breast cancer.

Piccart believes that trastuzumab is the most successful targeted agent for breast cancer thus far. Piccart says she wonders if the drug's success is not because of it's primary mechanism of action. Perhaps, she says, the most important aspect of trastuzumab is the stimulation of an immune response against the tumor. The oncology community will learn in the coming years about why some patients develop this immune response while others do not.

Piccart is most impressed with trastuzumb because it has demonstrated clear-cut activity in advanced and early disease. Other successful targeted agents demonstrate good, but not long-lived, responses and cannot be transposed from advanced to early stage disease.