Albuquerque Journal

Success Story
By By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Journal Staff Writer

Judy Madril beat the odds with a stick.
       
Doctors could offer her little hope in July 2005 when the Placitas woman was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and highly aggressive form of the disease.
       
Worse still, the cancer was metastatic, meaning it had spread beyond her breast to her liver.
       
“They gave me three months,” Madril, 48, said recently. “It was a long road for me and a very scary road.”
       
The prognosis for stage IV inflammatory breast cancer is nearly always incurable. Her physician, University of New Mexico oncologist Dr. Melanie Royce, did not mince words.
       
“Dr. Royce told her it was inoperable and incurable but treatable,” recalled Mary Kwapich, Madril’s mother.
       
But treatment had better results than anyone could have expected. Madril enrolled in a clinical trial that involved successive rounds of chemotherapy using a combination of drugs including Herceptin, a chemotherapy drug.
       
She took chemotherapy infusions each Monday for 18 months starting in September 2005.
       
Today, Madril is in remission, meaning there is no evidence of the disease. Surgeries removed her ovaries and a breast last year. She has no hair and complains of short-term memory loss as a result of the chemotherapy. But she’s alive.
       
“I told her to take it a day at a time,” Royce recalled. “But every day you wake up is a blessing because for most others, this is not their story.”
       
Royce said she could not discuss details of the clinical trial used to treat Madril. The findings will be announced at an American Society for Clinical Oncology conference in June, she said.
       
“Suffice it to say, it was quite encouraging,” Royce said of the study results. “Judy is one of our very successful stories. She has really beaten a lot of odds.”
       
Some 1,900 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in New Mexico, and about 200 die from the disease.
       
Clinical trials, once a rarity in New Mexico, have become more common here since the New Mexico Cancer Care Alliance was created in 2002, spokeswoman Debbie Putt said.
       
The Alliance has made it more feasible for New Mexico physicians and hospitals to participate in clinical studies by managing the administrative and regulatory work associated with the studies, Putt said.
       
Today, about 90 physicians and institutions statewide are participating in more than 100 cancer studies, she said.
       
Royce said UNM Cancer Center currently has 23 breast cancer clinical trials under way and eight more scheduled to start within a matter of weeks.
       
Royce hopes that ongoing research at UNM will lead to the development of an inexpensive test that could determine whether a cancerous tumor is dangerous or benign.
       
The study involves a type of genetic material called telomeres, which make up the ends of chromosomes.
       
“It is the clock of the cell,” Royce said. Shortened telomeres seem to tell cells when to die, she said. By contrast, cancerous cells don’t know when to die and continue reproducing, with disastrous results, she said.
       
An inexpensive test can determine a chromosome’s telomere content, Royce said.
       
Such a test could help women and doctors answer a key question: “Who are the patients who will do well” without treatment, she said, “and who are the patients who will do poorly and therefore it’s worth it to do aggressive therapy.”
       
UNM researchers completed a study last year that examined 600 women with breast cancer and found a useful correlation between telomere content and the severity of the cancers.
       
UNM now is planning additional studies that could lead to a cheap and useful prognostic test, Royce said. “If we have a cheap test to offer them, then we have made an advance for our patients.”