A New Lung Cancer Treatment Dramatically Slowed Its Growth

The FDA approved the treatment earlier this year

Doctor looking at a chest x-ray
A new type of treatment could help people living with lung cancer.
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According to the American Cancer Society, around 20% of all deaths from cancer in the United States are a result of lung cancer. It’s one of the most common forms of cancer in the U.S., as well as being the deadliest. All of which means that discovering new ways to slow its progression through the human body is vitally important — and a recent clinical trial revealed one method that was able to prevent lung cancer from spreading for nearly two years.

Writing at The Guardian, Andrew Gregory has more details on the clinical trial and its results. The study, which involved over 1,000 patients located around the world, involved treating people with advanced lung cancer with a combination of amivantamab and lazertinib.

As Gregory reports, the patients went an average of 23.7 months without their cancer spreading, a figure that exceeds the traditional treatment for such patients by 40%.

“By combining these two drugs, which stop the cancer from growing in different ways, we see a significant improvement in progression-free survival rates compared to the drug we currently use,” Raffaele Califano, who supervised the study in Manchester, told The Guardian.

The FDA approved this combination of drugs in August to treat non-small lung cancer. It’s a welcome reminder of what international cooperation in medicine can do – and something that could have a positive effect on the health and lives of countless people in the years to come.

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