New Drug Boasts 90 Percent Survival Rate for One Type of Cancer
A new cancer drug could spell hope for many patients suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to a groundbreaking study published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“After people experiencing CLL symptoms took the drug ibrutinib, their survival rate at 30 months is 96 percent,” lead researcher John Byrd, MD, director of the division of hematology in the department of internal medicine at Ohio State University, tells Yahoo Shine. “And for patients with more progressed diagnoses who have failed other forms of treatment, the survival rate is 90 percent.”
Byrd adds, “This is a breakthrough transformative drug for CLL. Taking a pill once a day can put CLL into remission and people on the drug say they feel like they did before the disease.”
CLL, the most common type of adult leukemia in middle age, is a slow-growing blood and bone marrow disease. For the phase 3 study, researchers studied 391 CLL patients — half of whom were given the pill ibrutinib, and the other half an injectable drug called ofatumumab (which is already used to treat CLL) — for a period of six months. Results showed that ibrutinib was more effective in keeping CLL from progressing and led to fewer side effects (infection, rash, heartburn, bruising) compared to the patients who got ofatumumab injections.
Ibrutinib is the first drug to target a protein in the body called Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK), on which CLL is dependent. “However, BTK doesn’t even have to mutate in the body in order for ibrutinib to work,” says Byrd. It's also a less invasive and less time-consuming option for cancer patients. "Most chemotherapies are administered through an IV," Jennifer Woyach, MD, assistant professor in the division of hematology at Ohio State University, tells Yahoo Shine. "However, ibrutinib is a pill that patients take at home, versus having to go to an office for several hours. It also tends to produce less side effects because, unlike chemotherapy, it only targets the sick cells."
For the time being, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved ibrutinib for a “second line therapy,” meaning it is an option for CLL patients who didn’t respond to chemotherapy or who only did so temporarily. However, Byrd hopes that, in the future, the drug will become the first line of defense against CLL. “The goal is that CLL becomes a disease that no longer requires chemotherapy to treat,” he says, adding that ibrutinib is now being tested on other forms of cancer.
His study comes on the heels of another hopeful development in cancer treatment. Scientists at the National Cancer Institute recently conducted a small study on nine women with cervical cancer. After researchers harvested “T-cells” (white blood cells that attack cancer) from tumors, grew them in the lab, and infused them back into patients, results showed that the cancer cells had vanished. According to a report published by Reuters, two of the women with tumors that had spread throughout their bodies experienced complete remission of their cancers after a single treatment.
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