Transcript for What to know about the latest breakthroughs in breast cancer research
It is October 1st which means it is breast cancer awareness month, and this morning we have a look at the latest cutting edge science to fight this disease and Dr. Kristi funk, breast surgeon and author of “Breasts: The owner’s manual” is here with promising news. All right. There is a new drug out there that is not fda approved just yet, but you believe it could really be the cutting edge in helping with chemotherapy. Without a doubt. So triple negative breast cancers lack three reseptemberers. Estrogen, and they arehe most Progressive we have to treat. There has never been a documented improvement in survival in any therapy we throw at these metastatic triple negs until now. The trick is immune therapy. And T centric, this is so cutting edge that today, the 2018 Nobel prize was announced going to chemotherapy researchers. Wonderful. What happens is this. You have got a cancer. Metastatic to the liver. Your chemo, your immune cells kill some of them, but never all of them, which is why stage four is always incurable. In triple negatives, you also have a bad protein that handicaps the cells and your immune system because it cannot see the cancer cells. Enter t-centric and two things happen. The protein melts away from the cancer, exposing it. All right. To your immune cells which are now activated and are able to literally seek and destroy this cancer dissolving it and prolonging survival rates. Oh my gosh. When you say it like that — I know. I have three 9-year-old kids so this is, like, so cool. I know. What is not cool is that 80% of breast cancer is estrogen-based and there is some new cutting edge there as well, right? It often spreads. It does often spread, and sometimes later in life. Years later. So there are now three new drugs approved by the fda against advanced hormonely driven breast cancers. They have all significantly been shown to slow down the progression, doubling the time it takes for disease. These are pills. You take them at home. Very promising. This is something that being a surgeon, caught your eye. This helps us surgeons localize cancers in the operating room that we cannot feel. Better than the traditional way which is using a wire pushed into a lady’s breast to localize the cancer while it is clamped between mammogram plates. Because it’s so localized, we can remove it with better margins, dropping the incision by 70%, and the cosmetic outcome is great. This is what happens. This reflector is placed in there. Even if you do chemotherapy first, it remains inert until you get to the hospital and you have this wand honing in on enemy plane. You can remove it and also interrogate the specimen to improve on margins. It’s great technology. It is. It is. All right. Let’s get moving. Why E. Exercise, indict, all those things. All help in preventing. It decreases estrogen levels, so much that just walking 11 minutes a day, drops cancer by 18%. But if you want to kick it up? They say for three to four hours a week you can drop breast cancer by 30% to 40%. Really? The rule is five hours a week if we’re going to just hike and talk, but if you break a sweat, you will only need 2 1/2 hours a week. What if you already had breast cancer like Veronica, our thriver warrior over here? Compared to doing nothing after a diagnosis, if you just exercise, you will drop the death rate from breast cancer by 45%. Come in here. It helps the body. Those drugs that we take for breast cancer — so go to pinklotus.com/move to learn about all this awesomeness. Give it up. All right. Always Dr. Funk, always.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
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