A Chinese research team has developed a new treatment with the potential to significantly improve survival rates for a virulent form of breast cancer.

The treatment, which uses a drug produced by a pharmaceutical company in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, was developed by researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University and tested in clinical trials in partnership with 25 Chinese hospitals.

The tests found that treatments using the new drug — named Camrelizumab — were as much as 12.1% more effective than previous therapies at treating triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).

The findings of the study, led by researchers at the Fudan University Cancer Institute and Shanghai Medical College, were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Dec. 13.

It is the first time in the journal’s 141-year history that an original breast cancer drug study based entirely on clinical data from Chinese patients has been published, according to Shanghai-based media outlet The Paper.

TNBC accounts for about 15% of all breast cancers and is considered the most aggressive subtype, as it recurs earlier and more frequently than other subtypes during operable stages and has worse survival outcomes in the inoperable stage.

The subtype is also defined by the fact that chemotherapy is the only primary treatment that is effective against it.

But even traditional chemotherapy sometimes proves ineffective, as acquired resistance often develops over the course of treatment, which significantly impacts patient survival rates.

Researchers worldwide have been trying to address this problem by exploring innovative forms of treatment that integrate immunotherapy with traditional chemotherapy.

Camrelizumab, the key drug used in the study, is a new form of immunotherapy that has proved particularly effective at improving treatment outcomes when combined with chemotherapy.

In the study, the treatment including Camrelizumab produced a pathological complete response — indicating no trace of cancer tissue remains — in 56.8% of patients, whereas chemotherapy alone did so for only 44.7% of patients.

The new treatment protocol — which has been dubbed CamRelief — achieved this without producing any uncontrollable adverse effects, the researchers said.

The CamRelief study involved 441 Chinese women aged 18 to 75 with early-stage or locally advanced TNBC. Notably, it included a higher proportion of stage III patients than previous immunotherapy studies, strengthening the evidence of its efficacy.

“This is an exciting breakthrough,” said Shao Zhimin, director of the Fudan University Cancer Institute and an author on the study. “It holds the potential to transform clinical practices in neoadjuvant treatment.”

However, Shao emphasized that to reach the market, the drug will still need to undergo further registered clinical trials and receive approval from China’s National Medical Products Administration.

(Header image: Getty Creative/VCG)