Lung cancer kills 1.8 million people every year, making it the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. With advances in precision medicine, however, doctors are helping prevent even more deaths, including with a drug combination just approved by the FDA in August. The results of a phase 3 trial of more than 1,000 lung cancer patients with a particular gene mutation show that, when compared with the standard treatment, a combination of two cancer-combating drugs extended progression-free survival by 40%. Doctors are calling it an "amazing" result amid a "golden age" of cancer research, the Guardian reports.
In the trial funded by Johnson & Johnson, published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers recruited 1,074 patients from countries including the US, UK, Australia, France, Brazil, India, and China, between 2020 and 2022. All had an advanced form of non-small cell lung cancer, the most common lung cancer, and a mutation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene, found in up to 25% of lung cancers globally and about 40% in Asia. They were randomly assigned to receive either osimertinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) and the standard treatment; lazertinib, another TKI; or a combination of lazertinib and amivantamab, a monoclonal antibody.
With side effects including rash, infection, and blood clots, patients in the combo group had longer progression-free survival at 23.7 months on average, compared with 16.6 months for patients who'd taken osimertinib—"itself a breakthrough treatment only a few years ago," notes the trial's chief UK investigator Martin Forster, a medical oncologist at University College Hospital, per the Guardian. Though the treatment will only be made available to certain lung cancer patients with the EGFR gene mutation, "new drugs are being developed to exploit vulnerabilities being identified in increasing numbers of lung cancers," Forster says. (More cancer research stories.)
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