CANCER treatment trialled at a North-East hospital has been found to extend survival in women with advanced breast cancer to nearly five years.

The Perjeta treatment, trialled at The Freeman Hospital, Newcastle, is the first in a new class of targeted treatments that work to block cancer cell growth and cell signalling.

When used with chemotherapy and the Herceptin drug, Perjeta was found to extend the lives of women with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer by 15.7 months.

Without the Perjeta, patients had a median overall survival time of 48.8 months compared to 56.5 months with the drug.

This is above and beyond anything seen in advanced breast cancer to date, let alone the sub-type HER2-positive which is known to be difficult to treat with a poor prognosis.

The findings are being presented to the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Madrid this week and Professor David Miles, a consultant medical oncologist and the UK study lead, described the results as “impressive”.

He added:“The introduction of Herceptin made a huge difference for our patients but this strategy of combining Herceptin with this second HER2-targeted antibody with complementary mechanisms, means that we are able to control the cancer and prolong survival for even longer.

“The observation that women with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer can live alongside their disease for so many years is frankly unprecedented.

“These data represent a significant step forward in the fight against breast cancer with combination therapies such as this paving the way for cancer treatments in the future.”

Perjeta was launched in the UK in March 2013 but is only available to patients via the Cancer Drugs Fund.

In August 2013, the NHS financial watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), issued draft guidance rejecting Perjeta for routine NHS use in England and Wales, but a final recommendation has not yet been issued.

Dr Sarah Rawlings, assistant director of policy and information at charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: "We were very disappointed when both Nice and the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) rejected Perjeta for routine use on the NHS last year on the basis of cost but it's not the end of the road.

"Nice have not yet issued their final guidance, the SMC is reassessing it and we know that the manufacturer will have offered some discount to help push it through in Scotland, so we await the results of these appraisals with great interest.”

The drug is produced by the Hertfordshire-based pharmaceutical company Roche.