According to new reports, a breakthrough new treatment for breast cancer has been shown to wipe out tumours in as little as 11 days.

Doctors working on the trial have described the results as “staggering,” and claim a new, two-pronged approach could pave the way for unprecedented breast cancer treatment options.

The discovery was announced at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Amsterdam, with the UK team of doctors saying the fast-acting treatment could spare thousands of women from intensive chemotherapy sessions.

The 257 participants in the study were all women newly diagnosed with an aggressive stage of breast cancer.

Trials were carried out at 23 participating hospitals around the UK, with doctors prescribed a combination of two existing drugs, Tyverb and Herceptin, as soon as the women were diagnosed.

However, by the end of the trial, 87% of patients showed improvement thanks to the treatment, while 17% of the tumours shrunk considerably, and 11% had disappeared altogether.

The leader of the study, Professor Nigel Bundred, a cancer surgeon in Manchester, said,

For solid tumours to disappear in 11 days is unheard of. These are mind-boggling results.”

While this clearly marks a major breakthrough in breast cancer treatment, Dr. Bundred expressed he wants to stay cautious before it’s been proven.

These results are so staggering that we will have to run another trial to prove that they are generalisable. But it is clear what has happened – we are pretty certain that we are not only getting tumour disappearance – we are getting an immune response as well.

Now that sounds like something we can all get excited about.