Success Rates Up For Experimental Cancer Treatments
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
People with advanced cancers who try experimental treatments are helped more than previously thought, according to the most comprehensive look at government-sponsored tests over a decade.
These are patients who haven’t benefited from other therapies and have few options left. But testing new treatments on them has been criticized by some who feel the patients are given false hope since previous reviews showed they only worked in about 4% to 6%.
However, this latest and largest study found that about 11% were helped by experimental treatment, and in some cases, as many as 27% were better off.
“The numbers aren’t as bleak as they sometimes are portrayed,” said one of the researchers, Christine Grady, of the National Institutes of Health’s Department of Clinical Bioethics. “But the numbers don’t tell the whole story.”
She said their review covered tests on different types of drugs and vaccines, combinations of drugs, and some that had already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Only 22% of the reviewed tests were for a single chemotherapy drug; that was the only kind included in the reviews that showed low overall response.
She said patients who want to volunteer for early drug testing should look at the details for the type of experiment they are considering. “Phase I trials are not all alike,” she said.
The first phase of drug testing in people is primarily designed to see if the treatment is safe and to find the right dose for future tests, though doctors also hope to get some idea of whether it works. These early tests are done in cancer patients who have failed other treatments.
Ms. Grady and her colleagues analyzed 460 tests with 11,935 participants, including some previously unpublished tests. They were done between 1991 and 2002 and were paid for by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute. Their review did not include tests financed by drug makers or those done on children. The research appears in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Overall, about 3% saw their cancers disappear and about 8% had a substantial shrinkage of their tumors. Additionally, 34% saw some tumor shrinkage or saw their disease stabilized.
The rate of deaths blamed on the treatments stayed the same, about half a percent.
