A new blood test can detect which bowel cancer patients can receive lifesaving immunotherapy rather than chemotherapy, enabling them to be cancer free after surgery, reports University College London Hospitals:
An immunotherapy drug given before surgery instead of chemotherapy meant that significantly more patients with a certain genetic profile were cancer free after surgery, according to clinical trial results…The findings…are interim results from the …. phase II clinical trial assessing whether the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab can improve outcomes for patients with stage 2 or stage 3 MMR deficient/MSI-High bowel cancer.
Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer…Like many cancers, if bowel cancer is caught early the chances of a positive outcome are high. Nine in ten patients treated for stage one bowel cancer survive for five years or more, but specific sub-types of tumours don’t respond as well to treatment and are more likely to return. Five-year survival falls to 65% in stage three and 10% in stage four bowel cancer.
In this trial, researchers from UCL recruited 32 patients with stage two or three bowel cancer and a certain genetic profile (MMR deficient/MSI-High bowel cancer) from five hospitals across the UK. Around 10-15% of patients with stage two or three bowel cancer have this particular genetic make-up, which represents around 2,000-3,000 cases per year in the UK.
Patients were given nine weeks of pembrolizumab prior to surgery instead of the usual treatment of chemotherapy and surgery, then monitored over time.
Results indicate that 59% of patients had no signs of cancer after treatment with pembrolizumab, with any cancer in the remaining 41% of patients removed during surgery.
All of the patients in the trial were cancer-free after treatment and are still cancer-free many months later. The median cancer-free period was 9.7 months and ranged from 5.3 to 19 months among individual patients. When standard care conventional chemotherapy is given to patients with this genetic profile, less than 5% have no signs of cancer after surgery.
The approach also meant patients did not require any post-operative chemotherapy, which has side effects and is tough to endure.
UCLH consultant medical oncologist Dr Kai-Keen Shiu, chief investigator of the trial, said: “Our results indicate that pembrolizumab is a safe and highly effective treatment to improve outcomes in patients with high-risk bowel cancers, increasing the chances of curing the disease at an early stage.
Even if this blood test saves lives, it will have to be approved by regulators before it is used, which could take a long time. The FDA can take a long time to approve medical tests. The FDA didn’t approve a home test for HIV until 24 years after it first received an application. According to an FDA advisory committee, the test held “the potential to prevent the transmission of more than 4,000 new HIV infections in its first year of use alone.” That means thousands of people likely got infected with AIDS as a result of the delay in approving it.
Earlier, a blood test was developed that can detect many brain cancers that doctors previously wouldn’t detect until it is too late to save the victim. The Guardian reported that “Surgeons and scientists have developed a world-first blood test for brain cancer that experts say could revolutionise diagnosis, speed up treatment and boost survival rates.” Despite advances in fighting other kinds of cancer, “brain tumors have remained notoriously difficult to diagnose. They affect hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year, and kill more children and adults under the age of 40 … than any other cancer.” But “now a research team has designed a simple blood test that could help diagnose patients with even the deadliest forms of brain cancer much more quickly, potentially sparing them from invasive and high-risk surgical biopsies….Experts said the inexpensive liquid biopsy could also lead to earlier diagnosis, which in turn would speed up treatment and potentially increase survival rates. The test would be particularly beneficial for patients with ‘inaccessible’ brain tumors, who could benefit from starting treatment as soon as possible.”
Researchers at an Imperial College brain tumor research center “found the test could accurately diagnose a range of brain tumours, including glioblastoma (GBM), the most commonly diagnosed type of high-grade brain tumour in adults, astrocytomas and oligodendrogliomas.”
Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer. “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply,” reported Next Big Future.
Doctors recently used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery. Doctors also recently did the first robotic liver transplant in America.
Artificial intelligence is now developing highly-effective antibodies to fight disease. Doctors overseas are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively.
