New Cancer Drug

 

In individuals who are resistant to immunotherapy, a novel cancer medication can halt the spread of the illness.When conventional treatment options, such as surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy have failed, immunotherapy employs the immune system to target and destroy cancer cells and can save lives. However, not all patients will benefit from it, and certain tumours may develop resistance to it, physicians in the UK discovered that immunotherapy in combination with the innovative experimental medicine guadecitabine can overcome a cancer's resistance to immunotherapy. They discovered that patients who were predicted to pass away after trying all available treatments lived significantly longer. In more than a third of the patients included in the early phase 1 study, the combination of the immunotherapy medicine pembrolizumab and the next-generation DNA hypomethylating agent guadecitabine stopped the progression of the malignancy. The Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer publishes the results.

According to specialists at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the dual combination might develop into a potent new weapon against a variety of cancer types.According to recent findings from a clinical trial, certain patients with advanced triple-negative breast cancer may survive longer when receiving chemotherapy plus the immunotherapy medication pembrolizumab (Keytruda).In the KEYNOTE-355 study, only patients whose tumours had relatively high levels of the PD-L1 protein—a PD-L1 combined positive score of at least 10—saw an improvement in overall survival.Patients who got both pembrolizumab and chemotherapy had a median overall survival of 23.0 months compared to 16.1 months for those who only received chemotherapy among those with this combination positive score. These findings are based on a 44-month median follow-up.