A pill, not an infusion: new drug combo cuts advanced breast cancer's advance by nearly half

For the roughly 70% of breast-cancer patients whose tumors feed on estrogen, the cruelest moment is when hormone therapy stops working. The Phase 3 evERA trial, published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, tested a new answer: giredestrant, a once-daily pill that destroys the estrogen receptor the cancer feeds on, combined with everolimus. It cut the risk of the cancer progressing or the patient dying by 44% overall — a median 8.8 months without progression versus 5.5 on the standard endocrine-therapy-plus-everolimus regimen — and by 62% in patients carrying the ESR1 mutation (10.0 vs 5.5 months). For people who have exhausted hormone options, an oral, at-home treatment that buys months more of life.