Targeted, personalized cancer treatments are the way forward
‘You have cancer’, these words can unnerve even the most upbeat and optimistic individual. And that is what precisely happened to Irene Mullen, when she was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2011.
She held on to the hope that with better cancer medication available, she will become cancer-free soon. The Daily Mail reports that Mullen unfortunately was diagnosed with non-small-cell lung cancer. The worst part? It was stage 4 cancer, and not too much hope was in the horizon. To make matters worse, she was also diagnosed with two brain lesions.
Naturally Mullen and her family were devastated with the news.
But the new drug crizotinib seems to have provided the much-needed succor and sense of optimism to Mullen.
How did Mullen end up trying this new medication? Mullen did so, when the cancerous cells continued to grow back even post an extensive session of chemotherapy at Royal Marsden Hospital in London. The hospital in the meantime was running clinical trials with a ‘clever’ drug that targeted specific genetic mutations that trigger tumors.
Mullen decided to participate in the clinical trial, involving crizotinib. 50% reduction in tumor size was seen in the brain and lungs! It was almost as if she had been administered a magic drug!
Crizotinib works on specific genetic mutations. The way forward in cancer treatment is genetically targeted treatments. The current one-size-fits-all comes with varying degrees of success; it works for some and does not work for some at all.
No one type of cancer is the same. Cancers vary considerably. Different tumors have different genetic makeups.
So will chemotherapy become obsolete? Dr Sanjay Popat, oncologist at the Marsden who specializes in lung cancer said,
For tumors that are no longer responding to chemotherapy, we are seeing them shrink within a matter of weeks, and a lot of people are leading normal lives again. What is so exciting is that we are looking at the treatment of cancer in a completely different way. We are not looking at whether it is lung cancer, or breast cancer — but at the make-up of the tumor, how it is mutating. It’s too early to say we won’t be using chemotherapy in 20 years time — I think there will always be a place for it — but there is little doubt that these targeted, personalized treatments are the way forward.
