Lung cancer sufferers have been given the hope of living longer.
Tests show that adding an experimental drug to traditional treatment Tarceva could extend their lives by nine months.
Data from a mid-stage clinical trial showed it improved life-expectancy in patients with tumours containing high levels of the protein ‘Met’.
Met causes cancer cells to grow faster than usual and they spread quickly around the body.
The drug, called MetMAB, failed to improve ‘progression-free survival’ in a wider group of 137 previously treated patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
Tarceva
Progression-free survival is the length of time during and after treatment during which the disease does not get worse.
However, taking into account only patients with high-Met tumours the results were promising, identifying those most likely to benefit from the drug.
Among these patients, those who received MetMAB plus Tarceva had median progression-free survival of 2.9 months, compared with 1.5 months for the group that got only Tarceva.
When the drug, developed by the firm Roche, was administered to patients with high Met tumours it helped them to live for three times longer than expected.
Median overall survival with the combination therapy in high Met patients was 12.6 months compared with 3.8 months for those treated with just Tarceva.
Roche’s Genentech unit is also developing a companion diagnostic test to identify those with high Met tumours, which account for about half of all patients with non-small cell lung cancer.
Dr Jesme Fox, medical director for the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, told the Daily Express: ‘Advanced non-small cell lung cancer remains a devastating disease, particularly as there are so few treatments currently available.
‘Increasingly, new drug therapies being developed for non-small cell lung cancer are being targeted – so called personalised medicine – and MetLAB is such a target therapy.
‘We hope that continued testing with this drug will confirm benefit for appropriate lung cancer patients.’
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A PILL taken once a day can double the time it takes lung cancer to progress.
Patients on Tarceva went for 9.7 months without their disease getting worse, compared to 5.2 months for those on chemotherapy.
People with mutated advanced non-small cell lung cancer had a 63% reduced risk of it deteriorating when taking the drug, a study of 1,200 patients found.
The pill could help around 2,500 people a year by extending the available amount of treatment time.
Dr Marianne Nicolson, consultant medical oncologist at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, said: “These results are very exciting.
“Tarceva is already used after chemotherapy, and this study demonstrates what can be achieved when it is used as an initial treatment.”