Once A Year, Cancer Research News Comes In A Flood, Not A Trickle

News about cancer therapies usually comes out in medical journals with the regular rhythm of an IV drip. But every now and then information comes out in a flood.

That's the case this weekend. The American Society of Clinical Oncology is holding its 50th annual meeting in Chicago. The convention typically attracts 30,000 attendees, making it one of the biggest cancer meetings of the year. And the amount of new information must be bewildering for even the most intrepid doctors.

The society says it received 5,530 proposed presentations for the meeting. Of those, 2,900 will get a hearing at the meeting as a talk or a poster. And another 2,200 will be published online. Clearly this process is nowhere as selective as getting a paper published in a major journal, so caveat lector.

And the choices of what to pay attention to are so staggering, even the organizers seem to be gobsmacked. "We have a wonderful group of talks this year," Dr. Gini Fleming, chair of the cancer education committee, writes on the meeting's web page. Duly noted.

Some presentations may rise above the noise with help from press releases. For example, the University of Colorado in Denver draws attention to a study conducted there that concludes there's no reason to keep giving statins to ward off heart disease to patients who are in the late stages of cancer. In fact, this study showed that people taken off the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs had a better quality of life and saved money.

A few presentations at the meeting get singled out by the New England Journal of Medicine, which has opted to publish research as it is presented at the meeting. Those papers include updated results for the medication ibrutinib, which the US Food and Drug Administration approved for chronic lymphoid leukemia (CLL) in February.

A new study tested ibrutinib head-to-head with another drug, ofatumumab, in patients who had previously been treated for CLL but had relapsed or hadn't responded to the traditional treatment. The study found that 90 percent of the patients given ibrutinib lived for at least one year, compared with 81 percent of the people given the alternative treatment.

A second report from the meeting, also published in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that women with a specific type of breast cancer were less likely to have a recurrence when treated with the drug exemestane instead of tamoxifen. In this case, 91 percent of women given the exemestane lived at least five years, compared with 87 percent of the women with tamoxifen. We are not talking big breakthrough here.

The meeting is a reminder that cancer therapy rarely improves in leaps and bounds, but rather in small increments. That's a challenge for journalists, since small steps are generally not newsworthy. Yet we do want to recognize advances in cancer treatment, because they can add up over time.

The real test is not whether a study makes headlines, but whether the 30,000 or so practitioners gathering in Chicago are able to find new ideas that help improve the lives of people with cancer.

New skin cancer drug hailed 'paradigm shift' in treatment

A new treatment for advanced skin cancer has been hailed as a paradigm shift after it boosted one year survival chances from just one in ten to almost three in four

Around 13,300 cases of malignant melanoma are diagnosed in the UK each year and cases have increased fivefold since the 1970s, thought to be due to the rise in sunshine package holidays and sunbeds

A new drug has increased survival chances from advanced skin cancer seven fold and been hailed a paradigm shift in cancer therapy, it has been announced.
The results of early tests using a drug to prompt the body's own immune system to attack the cancer has found that 74 per cent of patients were still alive after one year, compared to just ten per cent currently.
Dr David Chao, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust, said: “Pembrolizumab looks like it has potential to be a paradigm shift for cancer therapy.
“The survival results seen in the study which are the most meaningful measures of success to doctors and patients alike, are very promising and could benefit the many patients with advanced melanoma in the UK.”
Around 13,300 cases of malignant melanoma are diagnosed in the UK each year and cases have increased fivefold since the 1970s, thought to be due to the rise in sunshine package holidays and sunbeds.

Advanced skin cancer, which has spread to other parts of the body, has a poor prognosis and currently only one in ten people live for a year after diagnosis.
However some people have lived for two years while receiving the new treatment.
The new drug is being evaluated for use in 30 types of cancer.
The study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO 2014), showed three quarters of patients responded to the drug.
The drug is an antibody that allows the body's immune system to once again 'see' the cancer as a foreign invader and so attack it.
Several companies have begun making similar drugs and have been testing them in a variety of cancers.
One called ipilimumab (Yervoy) is already on the market for advanced malignant melanoma and can increase average survival from six months to ten months when compared with standard treatment.
The new drug was found to increase survival in those patients whose cancer had started growing again after treatment with ipilimumab.
Gillian Nuttall, Founder of Melanoma UK said: “Advanced melanoma is a terrible disease with a poor prognosis.
"Pembrolizumab represents the latest advance in a whole raft of new treatments in advanced melanoma which have come through over the past few years.
"The pembrolizumab results are really exciting and could represent a turning point for patients affected by advanced melanoma giving them a greater chance of survival.”
The makers, MSD, are hoping to apply for a European licence by the end of the year and it has been accepted for a fast-track licencing procedure in America.
Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: “It’s exciting to see the range of new treatments that are emerging for people with advanced melanoma. These new therapies harness the body’s own immune system to fight this cancer that has previously been so hard to treat effectively.
“Melanoma can only grow by finding a way to escape detection by the immune system. One way it does this is by triggering a shut-off switch on immune cells when they get close to the tumour.
"This treatment blocks the cancer cells' ability to use this switch, allowing the immune system to recognise and destroy the cancer. We are seeing a whole range of these immune treatments coming into the clinic, based upon the great progress we are making in our research into the immune system.”