It appears that a womb cancer drug can be effectively used to fight colorectal tumours although it’s too early to jump to conclusions, US medical researchers have revealed.
The research team from the New York City-based Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre (MSK) argue in a study that the antibody therapy medication Dostarlimab helped them cure every patient in a clinical trial.
According to the researchers, all 18 colorectal cancer patients involved in the trial were still in remission a year after it finished, with no signs of tumour reformation.
Needless to say, the medical researchers were shocked to see the results as they said that the successful remission registered in each and every trial patient may be unprecedented for a cancer drug intervention.
“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” oncologist Luis Diaz Jr. from MSK, the senior author of the study, told The New York Times. She said “It's really exciting”, adding that she thinks “this is a great step forward for patients”.
But why is the trial involving the use of Dostarlimab of special importance to those suffering from the disease? MSK oncologist Andrea Cercek, the first author of the study, explains that “the standard treatment for rectal cancer with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy can be particularly hard on people because of the location of the tumour”.
According to Cercek, such patients can suffer “life-altering bowel and bladder dysfunction, incontinence, infertility, sexual dysfunction, and more”. In contrast, the treatment using Dostarlimab only triggered mild side-effects, including a rash, dry and itchy skin, as well as fatigue and nausea.
And what about those who took part in the trial? Cercek said that “There were a lot of happy tears”, and that it was “incredibly rewarding to get” those tears and “happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realise, ‘Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery’”.
Nevertheless, the research team knows perfectly well it’s too early to tout Dostarlimab as a miracle drug, stressing that even though the results are “promising”, they need to be repeated in larger studies.
The same view was shared by Hanna Sanoff of the University of North Carolina's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Centre, who described the results as “small” yet “compelling”. She was not involved in the MSK study.
“Very little is known about the duration of time needed to find out whether a clinical complete response to Dostarlimab equates to cure,” Sanoff added.