Chicago congress hears of new hope for cancer patients
Print Edition
THE results of several clinical trials released yesterday show the revolutionary potential of immunotherapy in treating advanced cases of hard to treat types of cancer, such as bladder and lung cancer.
One has shown that the antibody Tecentriq — a product of Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical Roche — reduced advanced bladder tumors in a quarter of 119 patients tested, with a median survival of almost 15 months. These results compare with the nine to 10-month survival rate typical with chemotherapy, the researchers said.
The findings were presented at the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s largest cancer congress, held in Chicago.
Tecentriq, which allows the immune system to attack the cancer cells, was shown to be effective for patients with advanced bladder cancer who were too weak for chemotherapy.
“Up to half of patients with advanced bladder cancer are too frail to receive the only known survival-prolonging treatment,” said lead author Arjun Vasant Balar, assistant professor of medicine at New York University. “We are encouraged to see that atezolizumab immunotherapy may help address this major unmet need.”
The US Food and Drug Administration recently authorized sales of Tecentriq on an expedited basis based on preliminary results of the clinical trial.
“This and other immunotherapies have brought new momentum to bladder cancer treatment, which until recently had seen practically no treatment advances in more than a decade,” said Charles Ryan, a professor of clinical medicine and urology at the University of California at San Francisco who took part in the study.
“The fact that this treatment appears safe for elderly patients, who too often have few good options, is all the more encouraging,” Ryan said.
The researchers plan to carry out a more extensive clinical trial with Tecentriq as first treatment for advanced bladder cancer that mainly affects older people, the vast majority of whom are smokers or former smokers.
A new immunotherapy combined with an agent that kills cancer cells has also shown to be promising in treating patients suffering from the most aggressive form of lung cancer, which amounts to 10 to 15 percent of all lung tumors, according to the results of a separate clinical trial with 74 patients.
This treatment combines a new immunotherapy, rovalpituzumab tesirine (Rova-T), developed by start-up Stemcentrx that was recently acquired by the US laboratory AbbVie.
This combination blocked tumor growth in 89 percent of patients with high levels of DLL3 protein, and resulted in a cancer regression in 39 percent of the group being tested, which included some who had been given only a year to live.
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