Sunday 15 September 2013

Miracles in Cancer Treatments

Courageous Article for the Cancer Patients and their Relative

Nearly every oncologist can tell the story of cancer patients who beat the odds, responding so well to treatment that they continued to live lots of years disease-free, while most of their peers worsened & finally died.

an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Middle in New York City, delved in to the case of a woman with advanced bladder cancer who volunteered for a 45-patient study of the Novartis drug Afinitor. They discovered that a mix of gene mutations made her receptive to the treatment.

"Every other patient died, but she is without proof of illness for over years now,"

such patients - sometimes called "outliers" or "super responders" - have stood out by staging outstanding recoveries, or long-term benefit, from cancer drugs that provide small or no help to others. Small heed has been paid to them because there was no way to know why they fared so well. In most cases, the drugs that helped them were abandoned because they helped few patients.

"These experiences have always been out there, where somebody's grandmother was told they had months to live and they tried something and they bounced back," said Dr. Bill Hahn, an oncologist with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "But nobody ever understood why grandma responded in such a very fabulous way."

The Bethesda, Maryland-based National Cancer Institute (NCI) and academic researchers it sponsors have launched "super responder" initiatives to match patients having little-known gene mutations to drugs already shown to help others with the same mutations, even if their tumors are for a variety of organs.



Drugmakers are cautious, if only because they are sufficiently busy trying to create new medicines against some 300 identified cancer gene mutations. With the priority on developing drugs that will help giant numbers of patients, they are reluctant, at least for now, to look backward to salvage failed drug studies.

"We've tried to create our drugs specifically so they actually create the drug for the right population of patients" in the first place, said Sandra Horning, a senior oncology executive at Roche's Genentech unit.