A new cancer treatment can stop the growth of the disease in patients who have exhausted all other options, experts have found.
The innovative two-pronged treatment involves immunotherapy combined with guadecitabine, an experimental drug which can reverse cancer's resistance to immunotherapy, the Guardian reports.
Immunotherapy uses drugs to stimulate the body's immune system and help it fight cancerous cells.
The oncology team behind the discovery found that patients who were expected to die after running out of treatment options survived much longer. The combination of pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, and guadecitabine, a DNA hypomethylating agent, stopped the advance of cancer in more than a third of patients involved in the early phase one trial.
The trial, which was undertaken by experts at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden NHS foundation, included patients with lung, breast, prostate and bowel cancer.
Prof Johann de Bono, the study’s chief investigator, told the Guardian that his team "used multiple different methods to look for changes in the immune system, robustly showing that it was being influenced by the combination treatment".
He said that, if the drugs' effectiveness is confirmed in other patients and further studies are successful, guadecitabine and pembrolizumab "could help to tackle some of the resistance to immunotherapy we see in too many types of cancer".
The new treatment appears to be particularly effective for lung cancer patients, with half of those resistant to immunotherapy having their disease brought under control for 24 weeks or more.
One such patient, Alison Sowden, said it was "reassuring to know research efforts aiming to reverse cancer’s resistance to immunotherapy are under way".
The 61-year-old was told she had a year to live. But, after receiving pembrolizumab for three years, she is now cancer free.
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