Breast Cancer 'Smart Bomb' Announced Sunday

Those battling breast cancer – and those who will be diagnosed with the killer in the years to come – are receiving some hopeful news today.

The Associated Press is reporting that doctors have developed a way to deliver a "toxic payload to tumor cells" while leaving healthy ones alone.

“In a key test involving nearly 1,000 women with very advanced disease, the experimental treatment extended by several months the time women lived without their cancer getting worse,” the Associated Press reported today.

 Doctors plan to report their findings today at a cancer conference in Chicago.

“More importantly, the treatment seems likely to improve survival; it will take more time to know for sure. After two years, 65 percent of women who received it were still alive versus 47 percent of those in a comparison group given two standard cancer drugs,” the Associated Press reported.

So many women on the new treatment are still alive that researchers cannot yet determine average survival for the group, the Associated Press reported.

The drug is still experimental, and not yet available, but its backers hope it can reach the market within a year.

The treatment, according to the Associated Press, builds on Herceptin, the first gene-targeted therapy for breast cancer.

“Researchers combined Herceptin with a chemotherapy so toxic that it can't be given by itself, plus a chemical to keep the two linked until they reach a cancer cell where the poison can be released to kill it. This double weapon, called T-DM1, is the ‘smart bomb,'” the Associated Press reported.

"This is a major step forward," researcher Dr. Kimberly Blackwell of Duke University told the Associated Press.