The drug could also enable some cancer patients to avoid chemotherapy and and even surgery, scientists predict
Felicity Hart, 76. from Islington, pictured with her husband Alan, was treated for bowel cancer with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab prior to surgery and is now completely recovered .Scientists say the results are so encouraging that the drug could go from being an occasional, fledgling treatment, to the standard therapy for large numbers of bowel cancer patients in as little as two years.
The other 85 per cent of tumours do not have these characteristics and would need to continue using conventional treatments of chemotherapy and surgery to remove the tumour, scientists said. Scientists are also confident that the drug, or similar immunotherapy treatment, could be used to treat similar groups of people with other solid tumour cancers treat, which also have significant numbers of patients with the same tumour gene mutations that make them work – although this would still need to be demonstrated in trials.
All of the patients in the trial were still cancer-free many months later. The average cancer-free period was 9.7 months and ranged from 5.3 to 19 months among individual patients.Experts not involved in the study welcomed the findings.: “This could significantly change the way we handle what is the third most common cancer and the second biggest killer. It doesn’t affect all of them but it effects about one in six so that’s a big chunk.
David Church, a Cancer Research UK Advanced Clinician Scientist and Honorary Consultant Medical Oncologist at the University of Oxford, said: “This important study not only suggests that patients with early-stage MMR deficient bowel cancer in whom all cancer cells are killed by immunotherapy may not need chemotherapy after surgery, but even that some such patients may not need surgery at all, which is hugely exciting. Confirming this requires more work, which the study team plan to do.
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