(WBAL) There’s a promising new treatment that doctors are using for patients with a specific, highly aggressive form of breast cancer that is having great success.
It was a breast exam that Brittany Fleming did on herself last year that eventually led the 33-year-old mother to the Cancer Institute at Maryland’s St. Joseph Medical Center, and into the care of Dr. Michael Schultz.
“When you see this in a young woman, it makes you sad,” Schultz said. “It’s a very serious, large, locally aggressive tumor.”
What was next was a new treatment for her highly aggressive form of breast cancer called HER2+. The previous treatment using a drug called Herceptin had some positive results, but last year, Schultz said something electric happened. Herceptin, when combined with a new immunotherapy drug called Perjeta and limited chemotherapy, made Fleming’s tumor disappear.
“If you put her scans side by side, from that to that, you say, ‘My God, this is incredible.’ And then you see it in patient after patient after patient, and you say you’ve hit upon something really magical and really incredible,” Schultz said. “We suddenly saw that these responses were incredible to the point of 100 percent complete response with no residual disease.”
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