Chemotherapy is being frowned upon.
Scientists have found a new way to fight lung cancer that kills about 160,000 Americans every year. The new method called immunotherapy gives more benefit than chemotherapy.
The Washington Post reported that scientists have made progress in fighting lung cancer by approaching the disease as many different diseases rather than a single one. The medication works better on patients having high-risk mutations and gives better results than chemotherapy.
In international trials, Keytruda, the drug used for the treatment showed the effective result in patients who have advanced cancer and a high concentration of a specific protein on their tumors and turned out to be safer than chemo.
In a major achievement, the Food and Drug Administration approved Keytruda as a first-line treatment for such cases recently. As a result of this, the drug can be used for more patients and more advancement can be made in lung cancer treatment.
“We don’t want to oversell this, but for someone like me who has worked in the trenches for years, this is a big deal,” Julie Brahmer, who led the clinical trial and is an oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins told Washington Post.
“I have had one patient on this [drug] for five years, and she has seen her daughter graduate from high school and college,” he added.
Patients who have high level of protein PD-L1 on their cancer cells will receive Keytruda rather than chemo. The positive result of international trials has encouraged organizations to spend more on the research. The National Institutes of Health will spend $362 million on lung cancer research in current fiscal, compared with almost $700 million for breast cancer research.
As smoking is the main reason for lung cancer, sometimes patients are denied quality treatment because of the stigma associated with the disease. If the medical community could get rid of the stigma, more patients would be benefited as the new method could be tested on them.
“Patients are sometimes blamed as being responsible for their disease even though we don’t do that to people who are obese or have heart disease or other conditions that may be lifestyle related,” said Albert Rizzo, senior medical adviser to the American Lung Association. “Nobody deserves to have lung cancer.”
The study on patients noted that 70 percent of the patients who were given Keytruda were alive at one year, compared with 54 percent of the patients who were given chemo treatment. The average for progression-free survival — the period during which the disease did not get worse — was 10.3 months in the Keytruda patients compared with six months in the chemo patients. They also experienced significantly fewer serious side effects.