Ground-breaking warhead drug means the cure for lung cancer may FINALLY be on the horizon

Three new advancements will transform lung cancer treatment and turn the tide on a disease often considered a death sentence. Every ten minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with lung cancer – that’s about 50,000 new patients a year – and only a quarter survive beyond five years. About 35,000 die from it each year, making it our number one cancer killer.

But this weekend, doctors who treated it had much to celebrate when a series of highly effective new therapies were unveiled at the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference in Chicago.

In recent decades, research has made leaps and bounds in tackling other common forms of the disease, such as breast, prostate and colon cancer. heal effectively.

Experts say they’re tantalizingly close to a similar breakthrough with lung cancer.

“When I became a doctor, nobody wanted to specialize in lung cancer because it was a death sentence for most patients and we had no treatments to stop it,” says James Spicer, Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine at King’s College London.

‘Now new medicines ensure that even patients whose cancer has spread throughout the body live another ten, even fifteen years longer.

“We’ve gotten to a point where we’re starting to talk about healing these advanced patients.”

Perhaps the biggest excitement was for people with early-stage lung cancer, who could soon be given a high-tech drug that boosts the immune system, after a groundbreaking study found that the treatment significantly slows the recurrence of the disease.

The injection, called pembrolizumab, helps the immune system find hidden cancer cells in the body. It is currently only offered to NHS patients with advanced lung cancer whose disease has spread. But the treatment can now be offered to thousands of others.

Researchers at Stanford University in California have found that pembrolizumab, when taken along with chemotherapy in the three months before surgery and then for a year afterward, significantly lowers the risk of early-stage lung cancer recurrence, compared to a course of chemotherapy prior to surgery. .

On average, patients on the new treatment were still cancer-free after almost a year, while those who received chemotherapy alone were free of the disease for just four months.

While smoking-related lung cancer is declining as more people stop smoking, non-smoking-related lung cancer is on the rise, for reasons that are not yet fully understood.

The trial included patients with non-small cell lung cancer, the most common form of the disease, which accounts for about 80 percent of new lung cancer cases.

While researchers in the trial said it’s too early to report the exact number of additional months patients taking pembrolizumab are expected to live, experts say the early signs are incredibly positive.

‘The data we’ve seen shows that if you follow this treatment, you’re half as likely to see your cancer come back,’ says Professor Spicer.

‘That is hugely positive for these patients, who will live much longer as a result. The study also shows that in some cases, researchers were unable to find any signs of cancer at all. These patients have been cured effectively.’

Pembrolizumab is a so-called checkpoint inhibitor, which helps the immune system detect and destroy tumor cells.

Given by injection every three weeks, it has already proven to be a remarkably successful treatment in patients with melanoma, skin cancer, bladder cancer and lymphoma. Experts say the new regimen is likely to become routine treatment for lung cancer patients on the NHS. ‘The data show that giving pembrolizumab in addition to chemotherapy can reduce the risk of relapse in all patients with this form of lung cancer,’ says Prof. Spicer. “This will soon become the NHS standard of care.”

Experts say the next step will be to see if the number of pembrolizumab injections can be reduced.

“This drug seems to give people more time, but patients still have to come to the hospital regularly for their treatment,” says Professor Jyoti Patel, an expert in cancer clinical research at Northwestern University, Illinois. ‘These immunotherapy drugs are also not without side effects and they can increase the risk of other diseases because they affect the immune system.

“Future studies should look at whether we can de-escalate the treatment so that patients receive fewer doses and therefore have fewer side effects.”

Another challenge is detecting lung cancer early enough to offer patients this new treatment. Studies show that currently only about one-fifth of lung cancer cases are picked up at an early stage.

At the ASCO conference, the trial’s lead investigator, Dr. Heather Wakelee, chief of the oncology department at Stanford University, called for more research into lung cancer screening. “Without screening, we can’t find patients with early-stage disease,” she said. ‘It is important that we continue our efforts to improve screening.’

But experts say an NHS lung cancer screening program is already close.

In Manchester, a ‘Lung Health Check’ is offered to anyone aged 55 to 74 who smokes or used to smoke. ‘This could spread across the NHS,’ says Professor Spicer.

If approved by the NHS, pembrolizumab could be accompanied by another drug.

A trial to be presented tomorrow at the ASCO conference is expected to show that the immune-enhancing drug osimertinib, made by the British company Astrazeneca, significantly improves the survival time of non-small cell lung cancer patients with a specific genetic mutation called EGFR.

Although this mutation is carried by only 15 percent of lung cancer patients, experts believe this figure will increase in the coming years, as it is linked to cases of non-smoking-related lung cancer on the rise.

Studies suggest that these cases may be related to pollution. Osimertinib is only available on the NHS for patients with the EGFR mutation whose disease has spread to other organs.

Experts are also excited about another lung cancer drug presented to ASCO. Known as SKB264, it is also referred to as ‘a warhead drug’ because it can penetrate tumors and deliver a powerful ‘load’ of chemotherapy that attacks cancer cells from within.

The highly precise treatment, known medically as an antibody drug conjugate, avoids damage to healthy tissue, meaning doctors can give higher doses without making side effects worse.

In a study of 43 patients with advanced lung cancer who had recurred after surgery and conducted by Chinese drug developer Kelun, SKB264 was found to reduce the size of lung cancer tumors in approximately 45 percent of participants.

In this group, chemotherapy only works in about 20 percent of patients and lasts less than four months.

Patients who responded to SKB264 saw their tumors controlled for over nine months. Experts say this means SKB264 could potentially double the survival time for this patient group.

Experts say warhead drugs like SKB264 could soon be combined with immunotherapy and chemo to further extend the lives of lung cancer patients.

‘Conjugates of antibody drugs deliver toxic drugs directly to tumours,’ says Prof. Spicer. ‘Only 20 percent of lung cancer patients are cured effectively. Drug conjugates of antibodies could increase that number.’