Massive 'Breakthrough' as Cancer 'Disappears' for All Patients in Experimental Drug Trial

All hail drugs! The experimental drug dostarlimab was tested for six months in a short trial conducted by researchers at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. After participating in the trial, all of their tumors disappeared. While the sample size was small, the results are nonetheless astounding. In fact, doctors are using the term “paradigm shift”.

Only 18 people participated in the trial, so a lot more research is needed to better understand efficacy. However, many in the scientific community claim outcomes like these have never been seen before in the study of cancer.

One of those impressed doctors is Dr. Hanna Sanoff of UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. You should check out the article she published on the study’s findings and discussed the drug’s mechanism of action and its potential impact on cancer research with NPR’s All Things Considered.

She said, “I mean, I am really optimistic”, which sounds pretty promising coming from her. No one medication has ever been a viable treatment for all patients – and while it’s likely true for dostarlimab as well, perhaps it will be an option for many more people than most drugs.

There were little to no side-effects reported, and the vast majority of participants reported no side-effects whatsoever.

This medication is an example of a class of medications known as immune checkpoint inhibitors, and they are very effective in treating cancer. Rather than targeting the cancer cells themselves, the immunotherapy drugs on the market now work by stimulating the patient’s immune system to attack the malignancy. 

These medications have been used to treat melanoma and other cancers for quite some time, but they have only lately become standard practice for treating colorectal malignancies.

It’s currently expected that these individuals, who make up only around 5-10% of those diagnosed with rectal cancer, may be able to continue with just six months of immunotherapy. Assuming you avoid reading about cancer stuff like me – that would apparently be a true “paradigm shift”.

Today, many rectal cancer treatments, or lets be real – surgeries – are life-altering. Some post-op patients end up staying largely indoors for years, and in a few cases decades, due to the effects of incontinence and the embarrassment it engendered.

Dr. Hanna Sanoff (and I for that matter) want to see us do a larger trial in a more varied patient population to determine the drug’s true response rate.