Adding a Blood Vessel Drug to Treatment for Advanced Triple Negative Breast Cancer
Original title: Chemoimmunotherapy Combined With Antiangiogenic Therapy in Advanced Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: Real-World Outcomes From a Retrospective Cohort Study.
How far along is this research?
- Lab cells
- Animals
- Review
- Tested in people
This was tested in people. That is the most reliable kind of research we share.
Doctors only looked back at people they had already treated, so this is watched in people and not yet proven.
The short version
Doctors looked back at past patient records and found that adding a third drug kept the cancer in check for more people.
What was studied. Researchers reviewed the records of 218 people with advanced triple negative breast cancer. 99 of them got chemotherapy plus an immune drug. The other 119 got those same drugs plus a drug that blocks the growth of blood vessels.
What they found. The cancer stopped growing or shrank in 85.7% of the people who got the extra drug. In the group without it, that number was 73.7%. 24 of the patients had cancer that had spread to the brain, and in that small group the number was 83.3% with the extra drug and 33.3% without. Those brain patients also went 4.0 months longer before the cancer grew again, and lived 12.6 months longer.
What this means, and what it doesn't
What it could mean: For some people with advanced triple negative breast cancer, adding this blood vessel drug may help hold the cancer back longer. The gain looked biggest in people whose cancer was hardest to treat, including the small group whose cancer had reached the brain. It is a fair thing to ask your cancer doctor about.
What it doesn't mean: This does not mean a new treatment has been proven. The doctors only looked back at people they had already treated. They did not run a planned trial. A look back like this can be thrown off by differences between the two groups, so it cannot show that the extra drug caused the better results. The brain group was very small, only 24 people. This is also breast cancer that spread to the brain, not a tumor that starts in the brain. This is not a cure, and the authors say the idea still needs to be tested properly.
Source: PubMed, July 5, 2026 · Read the original
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