UK cancer centre to offer breast cancer treatment at home

The Christie NHS Foundation Trust has become the first cancer centre in the UK to offer the treatment Phesgo, developed by Roche’s Genentech division, for breast cancer at home.

Phesgo is a combination treatment containing Herceptin (trastuzumab) and Perjeta (pertuzumab), which are used to treat metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

The Christie, based in Manchester, is the first cancer centre in the UK to offer this treatment to patients in their own homes.

Patients will not only be able to receive the treatment at home, but also reduce the time they spend having the treatment and undergoing clinical observation.

This is because a typical maintenance dose would usually take four hours to administer in a healthcare setting – now, this can be safely delivered at home in 30 minutes.

Around 250 patients each month living in Greater Manchester and Cheshire will be potentially eligible for the new at-home service.

The new treatment is the latest step in the Christie’s expansion plan for at-home treatments – the cancer centre has almost double the number of treatments offered to patients at home over the last three years.

The Christie at Home service currently offers eight different drugs for patients across a range of different tumours, including lung, breast, melanoma, renal and urology cancer.

Treatments are selected for this service if they are well tolerated by patients, have a low risk of adverse reactions, can be administered to a patient in less than an hour and help to improve patients’ quality of life.

“The service has proved to be ideal during the COVID-19 pandemic as patients can be treated while shielding and it reduces footfall at The Christie. The nurses wear more PPE, but otherwise, the service is much the same as it was before COVID-19,” said Stephanie Hechter, chemotherapy outreach manager.