Get Healthy!

• Posted February 4, 2026

New Combo Therapy Extends Survival By More Than A Year In Advanced Triple Positive Breast Cancers

Taking one additional pill could buy more than an extra year of precious time for people with advanced breast cancer, a new clinical trial showed.

Adding the targeted drug palbociclib (Ibrance) to existing therapies added 15 months of progression-free survival to patients with triple positive breast cancer, researchers recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“These results show that adding palbociclib, a well-tolerated oral agent, to our standard treatment regimen provides a substantial and meaningful prolongation of response time and disease control for these patients who suffer from a currently incurable disease," study co-author Dr. Angela DeMichele said in a news release. She’s co-leader of the breast cancer research program at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

About 10% of all breast cancers are triple positive, meaning that they are driven both by female hormones as well as human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), a protein that helps cancer cells grow more quickly.

Existing treatment for these cancers involves chemotherapy followed by drugs that target female hormones and HER2, researchers said in background notes.

Palbociclib provides another way to attack breast cancer.

A CDK inhibitor, the pill blocks proteins involved in cell division, preventing cancer cells from multiplying uncontrollably, according to Drugs.com. Palbociclib has been available in the U.S. since 2015.

For the new study, researchers recruited 518 patients with advanced triple-positive breast cancer across 109 hospitals in the U.S., Europe, New Zealand and Australia between June 2017 and July 2021.

Patients were randomly assigned to receive either standard treatment or current treatment plus palbociclib.

Results showed that adding palbociclib halted patents’ breast cancer progression by a median 44 months, compared with 29 months for those who got standard treatment. (Median means half had longer-lasting results, half did not.)

"This was a really exciting study, and I think it will be practice-changing for patients who have this type of advanced breast cancer," said Dr. Brittney Zimmerman, a breast medical oncologist in Riverhead, New York, with the Northwell Health Cancer Institute.

"We don't often see clinical trials that show this much of a benefit,” said Zimmerman, who was not involved in the trial. “So, I think that this is something that's going to be pretty widely adapted as a first line therapy for these patients, so this is a really exciting update in the breast cancer space.”

Zimmerman said using this combination therapy as a front-line treatment will give doctors time to come up with other ways to extend patients’ lives.

“There are many other treatments that can be offered to patients after this first line of therapy, and if we're extending the time of the first therapy, then often we can eventually see an extension in overall survival, and that's really kind of the gold standard,” she said.

“We're still going to wait to see the overall survival data from this study, but the progression-free survival or how long patients are living before their disease starts to progress on the first treatment look to be significantly improved with the addition of the palbociclib,” Zimmerman said. “And so that's a major advantage."

The drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, paid for the clinical trial. The findings were published Jan. 28

More information

The American Cancer Society has more on triple positive breast cancer.

SOURCES: PrECOG, news release, Jan. 29, 2026; Dr. Brittney Zimmerman, breast medical oncologist, Northwell Health Cancer Institute