MIAMI – In the battle against breast cancer, researchers and patients are teaming up to uncover new treatment options.
When Debora Pedrini was diagnosed with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer in 2019 she didn’t expect to become part of a clinical trial.
“When the clinical trial was offered to me, to be honest with you, it was a hurricane of feelings. I was happy and I was scared,” Pedrini said.
She enrolled in one of more than 25 clinical trials currently on-going at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“We try to look into areas where we need to make advancement and try to identify additional clinical trials for our patients so that they have access to novel therapeutics and we’re also trying to promote investigator initiative trials to have those as well,” said breast oncologist Dr. Frances Valdes-Albini.
Valdes-Albini said the particular trial involving Pedrini focused on the use of immunotherapy following chemotherapy and surgery, with the intention of preventing a recurrence of cancer in patients like her who had residual disease.
“She just recently completed her immunotherapy, a year of immunotherapy, and she did very well with minimal toxicity and is right now disease-free and doing well thank goodness,” Valdes-Albini said.
“The importance of clinical trials is for us to build a stronger hope for the future in terms of treatments and medications that may be available,” added Pedrini.
For more details on clinical trials CLICK HERE.