In 2003, oncologist Dr. Rita Mehta had “the kind of moment everyone lives for” — everyone, that is, who’s working to find a cure for cancer.
Mehta, a health sciences associate professor of medicine at the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, was one of the first researchers to use chemotherapy combined with the drug trastuzumab (trade name Herceptin) on women with breast cancer before — rather than after — surgery.
Five patients in advanced stages of the disease participated in her original clinical trial, receiving the so-called optimized systemic treatment. One by one, over a period of several months, their breast image scans came in, looking like colorful Rorschach tests. Mehta liked what she saw.
“The tumors were disappearing before our very eyes,” she recalls. “When we reviewed the fifth patient’s scans, we realized we had a 100 percent response rate. That’s when I knew the treatment wasn’t just a fluke.”
Mehta, who works in hematology and oncology at UC Irvine Medical Center, Orange County’s only university-based hospital, published her findings and played a pivotal role in convincing the medical establishment to routinely administer chemotherapy and trastuzumab prior to breast cancer surgery.
“I felt like someone from the future. I used this treatment before it became standard procedure because I knew it saved lives,” she says.
Today Mehta continues to advance breast cancer research, conducting numerous clinical trials to improve chemotherapeutic regimens and incorporate new biological compounds to target tumors.
My mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer two times and both times have beat it now. I know that if this would have happened 30 years ago she probably would have been in a much worse if nt impossible situation and this is why I am so grateful to doctors like the woman above. God Bless!