Doctors have praised “unprecedentedly strong responses” to an injection that eradicated entire tumours in otherwise treatment- resistant cancer cases during a trial. It shrank the tumours for 42% of patients in the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, international study.
When his tongue cancer was at its most severe, Carl Walsh survived on a diet of soup, rice pudding, tinned ravioli and “many, many omelettes”. He supplemented the soft food diet with three prescribed nutritional milk drinks daily. The 56-year-old said: “I struggled to speak properly and found eating difficult because of the swelling and pain. I lost quite a bit of weight.”
Carl was among 102 people with head and neck cancer who participated in a study of a promising triple action cancer jab at The Royal Marsden hospital in London. Researchers have now celebrated “unprecedented” results, which discovered the injection caused some patients’ tumours to completely vanish.
The drug, amivantamab, is administered every three weeks. It blocks a crucial protein called EGFR that helps cancers develop and stops a second pathway called MET that tumour cells use to evade treatment. The drug also assists in activating the immune system to attack.
Carl, from Birmingham, said: “I was initially treated with both chemotherapy and immunotherapy, which unfortunately were not successful. At that point, I was recommended for the OrigAMI-4 trial.
“After only two cycles of the treatment my diet started to return to normal and I was eating a full diet after six months”, reports the Express.
View 2 ImagesThe trial, spearheaded by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research in London (ICR), was conducted across 55 hospitals in 11 countries(Image: Morsa Images via Getty Images)
“The thing I enjoyed most was the first big steak. My speech is completely back to normal and at work I speak regularly on headsets without problems.” Carl is now on his seventeenth treatment cycle. He added: “I now feel able to live a normal life. Since beginning treatment, the swelling has reduced significantly, and my pain levels have improved considerably.”
The trial, spearheaded by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research in London (ICR), was conducted across 55 hospitals in 11 countries.
It included patients whose cancer had continued to advance despite immunotherapy and chemotherapy, and was not linked to HPV. These patients tend to respond less favourably to standard treatments.
Some 42% of patients on amivantamab, or 43 people, saw their tumours shrink. Fifteen of those patients saw their tumours disappear entirely.
Those taking the drug survived for an average of 12.5 months after commencing the injections, despite typically facing a very poor prognosis once conventional treatments cease to work.
Professor Kevin Harrington, an expert in biological cancer therapies at The ICR and consultant at The Royal Marsden, said: “These are unprecedentedly strong responses in patients whose disease has become resistant to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
“This is a group of patients for whom treatment options are extremely limited, so seeing this level of benefit is very striking. This treatment has the potential to benefit many thousands of patients [in the UK and Europe] each year.”
Approximately 12,800 people receive a head and neck cancer diagnosis every year in the UK. Amivantamab has already received NHS approval for certain patients with non-small-cell lung cancer. The medication, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, is currently undergoing assessment in approximately 60 clinical trials across the globe, mainly focusing on lung cancer, but also examining colorectal, brain and gastric cancers.
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ICR chief executive Professor Kristian Helin said: “This study demonstrates how the development of new treatments through rigorous cancer research may lead to meaningful advances, even for patients with very limited treatment options.
“Achieving this level of tumour response and encouraging survival outcomes in such a challengingtotreat group represents a significant step forward.”
The research was unveiled at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago.