Chemo: soon to be a thing of the past?

It may not be a stretch to say that everyone reading this has been impacted by cancer somehow – be it through a friend, family member, spouse, etc. The disease is currently the second-leading cause of death in the US, killing ~600,000 people annually.

This morbid intro does have a point, and here it is: we may have a cancer treatment that performs better than chemo, per new data presented on Monday at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Paris.

💊 More deets… The key word here is “may.” The drug in focus, Lumakras, a KRAS-inhibiting concoction, was shown in a randomized controlled trial to be more successful at halting the spread of cancer than chemo – and with less serious side effects.

• In all, 25% of the patients taking Lumakras in the study lived for at least one year without their cancers getting worse, versus 10% of patients who received the chemotherapy docetaxel.

But, life being life, the new drug has a couple trade-offs: 1) it’s muuuuch more expensive than chemo ($17,900/month vs. $1,700/month) and 2) it wasn’t proven successful at extending a cancer patient’s lifespan. Though to be fair, the trial data on this is kinda murky since patients in the chemo group were allowed to take Lumakras, or a similar treatment, if their tumors got worse. In fact, about one-third actually ended up doing so.

🏛️👀 Looking ahead… Despite the murkiness around lifespan extension, Lumakras’ shown advantage over chemo should be enough to garner full FDA approval, the WSJ reports.