DRUG GIVES BREAST CANCER PATIENTS HOPE.

Byline: Sara Catania Daily News Staff Writer

Six years ago, breast cancer was killing Barbara Bradfield.

The La Canada Flintridge woman did everything she could to stop the ravenous disease that began as a lump in her right breast, enduring chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to remove both breasts.

But the cancer continued to spread, attacking the lymph nodes in her throat and her lungs as well.

``In my mind I figured I was going to die,'' Bradfield, now 53, said.

Then her doctor learned of a study at the University of California, Los Angeles, targeting women with a particular kind of breast cancer. He persuaded Bradfield to join. As part of the study, Bradfield and 14 other women with advanced breast cancer took regular doses of an antibody designed to root out and weaken the cancerous cells.

In Bradfield's case, the improvement was astonishing.

Within the first month, the tumor in her neck started to shrink. By the end of the six-month study, her cancer appeared to have vanished. More than three years later, it has not returned.

Now doctors are looking for women with breast cancer that has not yet been treated to join the study's third and largest phase, which has expanded to include 87 hospitals and research centers in the U.S. and 17 in Europe.

``It's going to give women an entirely new approach to treatment,'' said Dr. Dennis Slamon, director of the Revlon/UCLA Women's Cancer Center Research Program and leader of the study. ``Many women benefit from traditional approaches, but all too many women don't.''

The study is centered around regular doses of a new drug called HER-2/neu antibody, developed by Genentech of South San Francisco. More than 500 women are expected to have participated in the study by the time it is completed in December, Slamon said.

If the therapy proves successful in this last round, it could receive Food and Drug Administration approval and be on the market within two to three years, he said.

In 1996, an estimated 184,300 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed, and 44,300 women are expected to die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.

Slamon cautioned that the therapy can be administered to only about a quarter to a third of women with breast cancer - those whose cancer is accelerated by the overproduction of a gene that makes the HER-2/neu protein.

``This is a very particular type of genetic alteration,'' he said. ``Not all women with breast cancer have this alteration.''

Even women who fit the genetic model may not respond to the therapy. Of six patients who have undergone the therapy at UCLA in the past few months, one had her tumor completely disappear, three had their tumors shrink, one has stayed the same and one has not responded at all.

It will be difficult to put those responses into perspective until many more women have completed the trial, Slamon said.

``We don't yet have enough information for statistically meaningful evaluations,'' he said. ``We certainly have come to no final conclusions.''

The HER-2/neu antibody is thought to attack the overzealous protein by stunning the cancerous cells, causing the immune system to attack and destroy the cells and increasing the sensitivity of the cells to chemotherapy.

Slamon and his colleagues first discovered the link between the protein and breast cancer in 1986 while studying cancerous tumors that had been removed from patients.

``We reasoned that there's a wealth of information in that tumor tissue,'' Slamon said. ``The first thing we said is, let's see if there are any gross alterations in genes we know are involved in growth.''

After studying thousands of tumors and patient histories over a two-year period, the researchers concluded that women with an abundance of the gene that makes the HER-2/neu protein had more aggressive cancer and a lower survival rate than other women, despite similar therapy.

Slamon launched the UCLA study at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center to test this theory. At first, he accepted only women like Bradfield, who had failed to respond to traditional treatment.

``When you are testing something experimental like this, you don't know if it's going to work, so you only use it as a last resort,'' Slamon said.

Many of the women in the first phase were already so sick that even those who responded to the treatment died soon after. Of the 15 women who entered the first phase of the study, Bradfield is the only one who is still alive.

``I really feel blessed,'' said Bradfield, who spends her time working part time as a teacher's aide and painting.

Now that Slamon and other researchers are more confident of the therapy's benefits, they are extending treatment to women as soon as they are diagnosed, increasing the chance of survival.

``We don't have our final results, because the study is ongoing,'' he said. ``But I can tell you we are getting a very good response rate.''

However, while Slamon is encouraged by Bradfield's recovery and by the positive response of dozens of other women who have participated in the study, he is reluctant to draw any overarching conclusions until more time has passed.

``Cure is a difficult word to use,'' he said. ``You want to have at least five years cancer-free before you start saying things like that.''

For more information on joining the study, call clinical coordinator and RN Valerie Verity-Mock at [phone].

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PHOTO Barbara Bradfield has been free of cancer since using an experimental drug.

Tina Gerson/Daily News