Breakthrough: Huge new drug battles deadliest cancer of all

In what is being called a “breakthrough” discovery, U.S. authorities have signed off on a drug that is designed to treat advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

It’s the deadliest of all cancers, and this drug provides hope to those who suffer from it — it’s called Keytruda, or pembrolizumab, and in a large study using immunotherapy it was tested on about 500 patients who had non-small cell lung cancer, according to the Financial Express.

The findings were fantastic: many of the patients showed significant long-lasting responses to the drug — so many that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave it the official status of “breakthrough therapy” back in October 2014, meaning that it could be fast tracked to treat lung cancer.

Dr. Edward Garon, who is a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles and the lead author on the study, said that the drug could totally transform the way the medical community treats lung cancer. In the past, it would be extremely rare to see this kind of disease response in treatments before this trial, but this provides hope for people dealing with the disease to have a long-lasting response while avoiding chemotherapy and all the unpleasant side effects that are involved in that.

The clinical trial took place over three years, and it found that Keytruda showed a much better response rate than other drugs used to treat lung cancer. The overall response rate was about 19 percent — which means that their tumors were reduced in size by a significant margin. For those who responded positively to the treatment, they saw the average duration of response exceed one year — which may not sound like us, but for someone suffering from the deadliest form of cancer, that is a huge difference.

Keytruda has already been shown in tests to extend the lives of people who have melanoma, but this is the first time it has demonstrated tremendous effectiveness in fighting lung cancer.

Keytruda works by targeting the PD-1 protein. PD-1 acts as an “immune checkpoint” when it binds to the protein PD-L1, a process that keeps the T cells in the immune system from attacking the cancer, according to the report. Keytruda attempts to block this interaction between the protein cells in order to keep the tumors from expressing high levels of PD-L1, a tactic it uses to keep the immune system from attacking it. Keytruda lowers this guard to open up the tumor for attack.

It’s the first time a study has validated that the level of PD-L1 expression is closely tied with clinical outcomes. About a quarter of all screened patients showed a high PD-L1 expression in tumor cells, and these patients responded overwhelmingly well to the treatment — nearly 50 percent, according to the report.

Lung cancer, which is often referred to as carcinoma of the lung, is a malignant lung tumor that results from uncontrolled cell growth in lung tissues. The growth can spread beyond the lung into other parts of the body. The symptoms can include coughing up blood, extreme weight loss, and chest pains, to name a few.

The vast majority of cases are from exposure to tobacco smoke over a long period of time, although 10 to 15 percent of the time, it occurs in people who have never smoked. Usually in these cases it’s due to a combination of genetic factors or exposure to toxins like air pollution or asbestos.

Treatments for lung cancer can involve surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Surgery is more common in the case of non-small cell lung carcinoma, which is what Keytruda is meant to treat, whereas chemotherapy and radiotherapy are preferred in small cell lung carcinoma.

The survival rate of lung cancer sufferers in the United States is dismal, with only about 17 percent of sufferers outlasting the disease five years after diagnosis. It is the most common type of cancer in men and women,a nd it results in the most deaths worldwide at 1.56 million annually as of 2012.