This is good news, also because the drug already exists, but further confirmations will be needed and not all patients can benefit from it.
A pill taken once a day could reduce the risk of 50%. die of lung cancer, according to the “exciting” and “unprecedented” results of a decade-long global study. Taking the drug osimertinib after surgery dramatically reduced the risk of mortality of patients by 51%, as shown by the results presented at the largest cancer conference in the world — reads an article published in the British newspaper The Guardian.
All study participants had one EGFR gene mutation, which is found in about a quarter of lung cancer cases worldwide and accounts for up to 40% of cases in Asia. The EGFR mutation is more common in women than men and in people who have never smoked or have been occasional smokers. Speaking at the conference in Chicago, Dr. Roy Herbst, deputy director of the Yale Cancer Center and lead author of the study, said the “exciting” results lend great weight to previous findings from the same study that have showed that the pill also halves the risk of disease recurrence. Not all patients diagnosed with lung cancer are also tested for the EGFR mutation: “That definitely needs to change,” Herbst said, in light of the study results.
After five years, 88% of patients who took the daily pill after having their tumor removed were still alive, compared with 78% of patients taking a placebo. Overall, there was a lower mortality risk by 51% for those who received osimertinib compared to those who received placebo. The survival benefit “was consistently observed” in an analysis of all subgroups of the study, including those with stage one, two and three lung cancer. Chemotherapy was given to 60% of study participants, and the survival benefit of osimertinib was evident whether or not chemotherapy was received.
