A patch, not surgery: early oral cancer shrank in a new trial

For early-stage mouth cancer, the standard path runs through surgery — sometimes disfiguring, always frightening. Prothena's PRV111 offers a different route: a small patch applied where the tumor is, delivering chemotherapy directly and locally. In an interim look at the ongoing Phase 2 study, most of the treated lesions shrank, and none of the treated patients saw their cancer progress. If the full trial holds up, it would be the first non-surgical therapy developed for early-stage oral cancer — treatment without the scalpel.