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US-HEALTH-CANCER-LUNG
Immunotherapy boosts survival outlook for lung cancer patients: study
CHICAGO, June 2, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – An immunotherapy treatment helped
significantly boost survival rates among patients suffering from advanced
lung cancer, according to the results of a clinical trial cited by
researchers on Saturday.
Almost 25 percent of patients who received the drug pembrolizumab and had
not previously received chemotherapy were alive after five years, said the
study which was presented at annual meeting of the American Society of
Clinical Oncology.
The figure dropped to just over 15 percent for patients who had previously
received chemotherapy.
“The uniformly negative outlook that has been associated with a diagnosis
of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is certainly no longer
appropriate,” said lead author Edward Garon, an associate professor at UCLA.
The five-year survival rate was 5.5 percent in the pre-immunotherapy era.
Unlike chemotherapy, immunotherapy works by leveraging the body’s own
immune system to fight disease.
In this case, the drug acts by turning off a brake in the immune system, a
protein called PD-1, which then allows cancer-fighting T-cells to attack
faster and more effectively.
“I describe it as sort of changing the thermostat, in terms of how willing
the immune system is to tolerate something versus reject it,” Garon told AFP.
David Graham, an oncologist at the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte,
North Carolina who was not involved with the study, said: “It’s truly
remarkable that for more patients than ever before, we no longer have to
count survival in months.
“However, we still have a long way to go to improve outcomes for all NSCLC
patients.”
According to Garon, the trial proved there are groups of patients “who do
have long-term survival prospect, and that does change the way we talk to our
patients about the disease.”
Moving forward, his team would like to identify other biomarkers to target
to further improve survival rates.
“I think we’re all hopeful that these are the early days of immunotherapy,”
he told AFP.
“But I think what this indicates is that even in those early days, there
are clear instances in difficult diseases where we can really transform the
management of the diseases.”
BSS/AFP/GMR/0923 hrs