2023-06-05 04:00:13
Sunday, June 4, the convention center which borders Lake Michigan, in Chicago (Illinois), was in turmoil. Thousands of women and men, medical oncologists, researchers and employees of pharmaceutical laboratories, walked the corridors of this sprawling building, looking for a presentation not to be missed, a meeting to follow, a stand at to visit. With 43,000 participants, the annual high mass of cancerology, the congress of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), had returned to the attendance levels of previous years – those before the health crisis.
What’s new this year in terms of cancer treatment? Small streams make great rivers: the 2023 edition of the ASCO perfectly illustrates the adage. No major revolution, but a sum of “step by step progress” which reinforce the interest of two booming strategies. This involves, on the one hand, administering innovative treatments to patients suffering from early cancers that are still localized (not metastasized); on the other hand, to personalize the therapies according to the “tumor profile” of each patient (for example, their molecular abnormalities).
Demonstration, in Chicago, with the second most frequent cancer in the world, that of the lung. That is 2.21 million new cases and 1.80 million deaths each year on the planet, including more than 46,000 cases and 33,000 deaths in France.
At 2 p.m. this Sunday, no less than ten giant screens broadcast, in a crowded hall, the presentation which opened the series of “plenary sessions”, these highlights of the congress. All awaited the results of a study presented by Roy Herbst, of the Yale School of Medicine (Connecticut).
The challenge ? To assess, in certain patients with early-stage lung cancer, the benefit of adding to standard treatment a drug targeting the molecular anomaly present in their tumour. Indeed, at less than 10% to 15% of these patients (and even more in some countries) carry a mutation in a gene encoding a protein called EGFR. Once mutated, this protein causes an unbridled, anarchic multiplication of tumor cells. The cancers concerned here, it should be noted, are of the “non-small cell” type, the most frequent.
A life expectancy that “jumps from one to four years”
Laboratories have therefore developed drugs that inhibit mutated EGFR proteins. While the first two generations lacked specificity – they also inhibited the normal EGFR protein, present on the surface of all cells, hence their many adverse effects – the third is more selective. Its main representative, osimertinib (AstraZeneca laboratories), was at the center of attention of the day.
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