Fresh Weapons For an Old Battle; New treatments for breast cancer are easier on patients and more efficient at killing tumors.

Byline: Anne Underwood

Anyone who has survived chemotherapy knows how brutal it can be. But thanks to an experimental procedure, Barbara Link, 55, of Cary, North Carolina, found that parts of the treatment were "actually pleasant." Her enthusiasm is all the more surprising because she was given two especially toxic drugs in high doses. The difference is that Link received her chemo in fat-coated droplets that release their contents when they're heated to 102 degrees--a higher temperature than the body normally reaches. By gently --warming her breast, her doctors unleashed the cell-killing compounds in the vicinity of the tumor without poisoning the rest of her body. All she had to do was lie face down on a padded table, her affected breast protruding through an opening into a tub of warm water. Then she blissed out to the music of Yanni while radio waves heated the breast. "Most patients really enjoy the table," says Dr. Kimberly Blackwell, the medical oncologist at Duke University who treated Link. Patients have even coined their own name for it--the "boobie Jacuzzi."

Sometimes it's a tossup which is worse--having breast cancer or undergoing treatment for it. Therapy can be toxic, disfiguring and ultimately futile. But breast cancer is one malignancy that doctors think they're finally starting to beat. "Almost every month, I have a drug or an option I didn't have the month before," says Blackwell.

Some of the most exciting advances involve genetic profiling, a technique that could soon enable doctors to tailor treatment to the precise genetic signature of a tumor. In January a test became available to help doctors figure out which breast-cancer patients would benefit from the estrogen-receptor blocker tamoxifen alone and which needed additional chemotherapy. The test, from Genomic Health, Inc., of Redwood City, California, assesses 21 key genes in a tumor-tissue sample, then crunches the data into a single score from zero to 100. "The higher the number, the worse the woman will fare on tamoxifen alone," says CEO Randy Scott. "It's the first test of its kind going beyond age and tumor size for prognosis in cancer."

Doctors would like to use gene profiles to answer all kinds of treatment questions. Who ...