Eight and a half months more life: a guided drug beats chemo when the first targeted pill fails

For people whose lung cancer carries a change in a growth switch called EGFR, the first targeted pill usually works — until it doesn't, and standard chemotherapy becomes the fallback. In the Phase 3 OptiTROP-Lung04 trial, 376 such patients received either sacituzumab tirumotecan (sac-TMT) on its own — a guided drug that carries a cell-killing payload straight to a marker on the surface of tumour cells — or standard platinum-based chemotherapy. After a median follow-up of 32.3 months, people on sac-TMT lived a median of 25.9 months, against 17.4 months on chemotherapy: eight and a half months longer, with a 31% lower risk of death. At two years, 54.1% of the sac-TMT group were still alive, compared with 37.2% on chemotherapy, and longer follow-up brought no new safety concerns. The drug was already approved in China in September 2025 for exactly these patients, and this final survival analysis, presented by Professor Wenfeng Fang of Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center at the ESMO congress in Madrid, gives doctors the mature, long-term proof that the benefit lasts.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation