New cancer drug 'cures every patient in trial'
NEW YORK, June 7, 2022
A new experimental cancer drug has offered astonishing results, virtually curing every patient in the trial, a report said.
The rectal cancer patients in the United States have seen their cancer disappear after undergoing experimental immunotherapy, the report in the New England Journal of Medicine said.
The patients, who were part of a small clinical trial led by researchers from New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center, saw their tumours vanish after being treated with the drug called dostarlimab.
One year after the trial ended, each of the 18 colorectal cancer patients had gone into remission and doctors were reportedly unable to find signs of the cancer.
Dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody drug that is approved to treat endometrial cancer in the UK, costs about $11,000 per 500mg dose in the US.
It is currently is given to around 100 advanced endometrial cancer patients every year, aiming to improve patients’ quality of life and avoid chemotherapy.
Participants received a dose of dostarlimab every three weeks for six months, with the idea being that they would need to undergo standard treatments of chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery following treatment.
However, researchers found that in every case, the cancer was cleared through the experimental treatment alone.
One of the paper’s authors, Dr Luis Diaz Jr of Memorial Sloan Kettering, told the New York Times that he knew of no other study in which a treatment completely obliterated a cancer in every patient.
Immunotherapy harnesses the body’s own immune system as an ally against cancer. The MSK clinical trial was investigating — for the first time ever — if immunotherapy alone could beat rectal cancer that had not spread to other tissues, in a subset of patients whose tumor contain a specific genetic mutation.
In every case, the rectal cancer disappeared after immunotherapy — without the need for the standard treatments of radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy — and the cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have been cancer-free for up to two years.
