One pill cuts risk of lung cancer death in half

Test tubes in front of the AstraZeneca pharmaceutical group logo on May 21, 2021. REUTERS / Dado Ruvic / Illustration / File Photo

The pills halved the risk of dying from a certain type of lung cancer when taken daily after surgery to remove a tumor, according to “impressive” clinical trial results released Sunday. They were presented in Chicago at the largest annual oncology conference organized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Lung cancer is the cancer that causes the most deaths, with about 1.8 million deaths worldwide each year.

This treatment, developed by pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, osimertinib (sold under the name Tagrisso), targets a specific type of lung cancer. This applies to patients suffering from so-called “non-small cell” cancer (the most common form) and having a certain type of mutation. These mutations (called the epidermal growth factor receptor or EGF receptor) affect 10% to 25% of lung cancer patients in the US and Europe, and 30% to 40% in Asia.

Approximately 680 people in the early stages of the disease (stages 1b-3a) from over 20 countries participated in the clinical trial. First, they had to be operated on to remove the tumor, then half of the patients took the treatment daily, and the other – a placebo.

Result: Taking the pill resulted in a 51% reduction in the risk of death in treated patients compared to placebo. After five years, 88% of treated patients were still alive, compared to 78% of placebo patients.

The data is “impressive,” Yale University’s Roy Herbst, who presented it in Chicago, said in a press release. The drug helps “prevent the spread of the disease to the brain, liver and bones,” he added at a press conference. About a third of “non-small cell” cancers can be operated upon, he said.

Already sold

“It’s hard for me to say how important these results are,” Nathan Pennell of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, who was not involved in the study, commented during a press conference. “We have entered the era of personalized therapy for patients in the early stages,” he said, “and we must close the door to undifferentiated treatment for everyone,” namely chemotherapy.

According to a press release from AstraZeneca, osimertinib has already been approved in dozens of countries and has already reached about 700,000 people. Its approval in the United States in 2020 for the indication considered here was based on previous data that showed an improvement in patient disease-free survival, that is, the time lived without a recurrence of the cancer. But all the doctors had not yet accepted the treatment and were waiting for the overall survival data presented on Sunday, Roy Herbst explained. He stressed the need to “screen patients” to find out if they have an EGF receptor mutation. “Otherwise, we cannot use this new treatment,” the oncologist said, specifying that osimertinib, which acts on this receptor, causes side effects such as extreme fatigue, redness of the skin or diarrhea.

Source: L Orient Le Jour

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