University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center Oncologist Dr. Edward Romond spent his career at UK treating and studying breast cancer, even leading major Phase 3 clinical trials on the breast cancer drug trastuzumab in the early 2000s. Commonly known as Herceptin, this drug became a standard of care for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.
Though he retired from practice last year, Romond continues to work part-time with the research team at Markey, this time pushing toward a cure for a different, more deadly, type of breast cancer.
“Breast cancer, we now recognize, is at least five different disease that are completely different from each other,” Romond said. “And the hardest nut to crack is this one called triple-negative breast cancer.”
Triple-negative breast cancer is a moniker given to a particularly aggressive group of breast cancers that often affect younger women. Unlike the receptor-positive types of breast cancer, which have biomarkers that tell oncologists which treatment the patient should respond to, triple negative breast cancers have no definitive biomarkers. If the patient does not respond well to the current standard of care, it’s up to the oncologist to make an educated guess about which chemotherapy will do the job.
Read more at UK Now.