The latest discoveries in the field of cancer reveal “where are things going” in the words of Álvaro Rodríguez-Lescure, vice president of the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (Seom). “In recent years we have understood that cancer is not a disease, but a set of diverse pathologies. And what commands now is the targeted Therapy, personalized medicine,” he says. According to this oncologist, the “key to success” is designing drugs that target “genomic and molecular peculiarities” of the different types of cancer.
“We no longer talk about lung or breast cancer, but lung or breast cancers. Each one has some different features that make some targeted strategies work and others. This personalization of the treatment is what the entire research and development effort is based on,” adds Rodríguez-Lescure.
This month, researchers from the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute presented a biomarker that will effectively treat the most serious cancers. This will be used to decipher the Genetic chaos of the deadliest cancers. The work was published in ‘Nature’. The biomarker described in the article facilitates the detection of “fingerprints” in the genome of the tumors that allow to know the mutational mechanism that causes the development of the tumor and, thanks to this, makes it possible to identify the vulnerability of these tumors against which direct treatment. Knowing the genomic identity of the most aggressive cancers will allow more precise diagnoses and a choice of the most optimal treatment for each patient.
In April, ‘Nature Cancer’ published the results of a study, still in phase 1, on a treatment carried out by the MCLA-158 antibody, which responds to the trade name of Petosemtamab. The treatment blocks the stem cells of solid tumors and the appearance of metastases. The results from ‘Nature Cancer’ were promising: this drug candidate was successfully tested in 10 patients.
For patients with solid tumors such as colon, gastric, esophageal or those located in the head and neck Surgery is usually used chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or immunotherapy but as is known, there is no definitive cure, in many cases the tumor cannot be stopped and the patient relapses and may die. The hope of the doctors is that this antibody will be more effective than the current therapies.
Less than a month ago, the usefulness of the trastuzumab deruxtecan in the breast cancer patients. It is a kind of immunotherapy which increases disease-free survival and median survival compared to standard treatments. An international phase three study, in which four Catalan centers participated, tested the efficacy of this drug in a new segment of women: those with a HER2-negative tumor. in them reduces mortality by up to 40% and controls the disease twice as long as chemo. For oncologists, and especially those who are researching breast cancer, trastuzumab is the most revolutionary of recent months in cancer research and opens the door to treat other types of disease, such as lung cancer.
In March, another study led by the International Breast Cancer Center (IBCC) had already shown that trastuzumab improved progression-free survival at 12 months in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.
Also relevant, in February, a phase 3 study by the US Gynecological Oncology Group (GOG) and the European Network of Gynecological Oncology Trials Groups (Engot) also published in ‘The New England Journal of Medicine’ showed the efficacy of anti-PD-1 antibody cemiplimab as a treatment for patients with cervical cancer. It was the largest clinical study conducted in these patients and cemiplimab, the first immune treatment that demonstrated an improvement in survival.
CAR-T is one of the most revolutionary immunotherapies in the world of cancer. It is a advanced therapy that involves altering T cells body’s own (a type of white blood cell that is key in the immune system) so that they can find and destroy cancer cells. A week ago, the Sant Pau Hospital (Barcelona) presented the results of his first trial of a CAR-T produced entirely by this center for the treatment of lymphoma (a type of blood cancer). The study demonstrated the high effectiveness, since it managed to eliminate the cancer in half of the 10 participants.