High Profile Breast Cancer Drug Now FDA-Approved

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new breast cancer drug to help treat postmenopausal women with a certain type of advanced breast cancer that did not respond to previous treatments.

The new medicine, Ibrance, is from Pfizer Inc. and will help treat women who have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2 through the injectable product. The protein can cause cancer cells to divide and grow faster than usual.

"This approval represents the first treatment advance for this group of women in more than 10 years," said Mace Rothenberg, the head of oncology for Pfizer.

The new treatment is intended to be used in combination with another cancer drug known generically as letrozole, according to The Associated Press (AP).

Researchers at UCLA helped test the drug, noting in a statement that Ibrance has thus far produced "groundbreaking results" in studies conducted at the university and has the potential to become a mainstay treatment, over time, according to Fox News.

Statistics show that about 1 in 8 U.S. women will develop some type of invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime.

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