A drug from Pfizer has been found to be effective in treating a rare form of lung cancer.
Xalkori, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August 2011, was said to be efficient in reducing the size of tumors in lung cancer patients with a rare genetic mutation.
The drug, which is also known as crizotinib, was administered to non-small-lung cancer patients with an abnormality in the ROS1 gene. The drug had a success rate of 72 percent, decreasing the size of tumors in 36 out of 50 patients. Out of the 14 patients that did not experience shrinkage, nine had the growth of their tumors stopped.
Abnormalities in the ROS1 gene only occur in about one percent of all patients with non-small-lung cancer. Every year, there are about 1.5 million new cases of NSCLC around the world. This brings the total number of people with ROS1 gene abnormalities to about 15,000 each year. The mutation is often found in younger patients that are non-smokers, according to reports.
"This is the first definitive study to establish crizotinib's activity in a large group of patients with ROS1-positive lung cancer and confirms that ROS1 is a bona fide therapeutic target in those patients," said Dr. Alice Shaw from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston.
Shaw, the lead investigator for the research, added that the period of remission was prolonged in patients who were given Xalkori, compared with those taking other forms of targeted treatment. She also noted how resistance to treatment seems to take place at a much later point.
According to the research team, patients involved in the study responded to the drug on an average of 17 months. The medicine, which is taken orally twice a day, was also said to have halted tumor growth in half of the patients by the end of the study period.
The clinical study was detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research occurred between late 2010 and August 2013.
