Durvalumab in Patients With HER-2 Positive Metastatic Breast Cancer Receiving Trastuzumab

The standard or usual treatment for this type of disease at this point is to receive a drug called trastuzumab that targets the HER-2 receptor. Durvalumab is a new type of drug for many types of cancer. This drug is an antibody and laboratory tests show that it works by allowing the immune system to detect your cancer and reactivating the immune response. This may help to slow down the growth of cancer or may cause cancer cells to die. Durvalumab has been shown to shrink tumours in animals and has been studied in a few people and seems promising but it is not clear if it can offer better results than standard treatment alone. The use of durvalumab when receiving standard treatment is being studied because it is thought that one way of over-coming resistance to the standard therapy is to add a drug that activates the immune system, as durvalumab has been shown to do, thus "re-sensitizing" immune function to kill cancer cells.