THE drug Herceptin was yesterday hailed as a potential cure for breast cancer that will revolutionise the way the disease is treated and save up to 1,500 lives a year in Britain and many tens of thousands across the world.

As an editorial in the world’s most authoritative medical journal spoke of the drug’s “stunning” results in trials, the Prime Minister insisted that it had to be made available in Britain more quickly.

A health authority in the West Country has become the first in the NHS to say that it will make the drug available to all suitable women with early breast cancer, even before it is cleared by regulatory authorities. The cost for a year’s treatment is £21,800 per patient.

The publication of trial data on Herceptin in the New England Journal of Medicine was accompanied by an editorial by a top US specialist proclaiming the results as revolutionary.

The most striking finding is that the peak in recurrence of the disease in the first two to three years after surgery has been eliminated in women taking Herceptin, said Dr Gabriel Hortobagyi in the editorial. “This observation suggests a dramatic and perhaps permanent perturbation of the natural history of the disease, maybe even a cure,” he wrote.

“Longer follow-up will determine whether this is correct.”

Dr Hortobagyi is Professor of Medicine and chairman of the Department of Breast Medical Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, one of the leading cancer centres in the US.

In a commentary in NEJM, Dr Harold Burstein, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that the study showed dramatic progress for patients with HER-2 positive breast tumours. “This is probably the biggest evidence of a treatment effect I’ve ever seen in oncology,” he said. “It is quite remarkable.”

Forced on to the back foot by growing clamour from patients and cancer charities, the Prime Minister yesterday conceded in the Commons that Herceptin had shown the need to speed up drug approvals.

“At present, I think we all accept the procedures are too slow,” Mr Blair said.

“We are looking at how we can speed that process up in cases where it particularly matters to people who may be desperately ill and think there is a drug on the market that can help them.”

Currently, the drug is licensed for use only in advanced breast cancer, though doctors can use their discretion to prescribe it in other exceptional cases.

Only a proportion of women with breast cancer benefit from Herceptin, which acts against a protein found in 20-30 per cent of women with particularly aggressive breast tumours. Women must be tested first before they are prescribed the drug to see if it will work for them.

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