Eight extra months of life: two drugs together hold back an aggressive lung cancer once main treatment ends

Small cell lung cancer that has spread widely is one of the fastest-moving cancers there is, and it usually comes roaring back soon after the first round of treatment ends. In a late-stage trial of 563 people whose cancer had not grown during that first treatment, doctors in Madrid heard on Sunday what happened when patients kept taking two immune medicines together as a holding treatment — tarlatamab, which drags the patient's own immune cells onto the cancer, plus durvalumab — instead of durvalumab alone. People on the pair typically lived 21.1 months, against 12.7 months on the single drug — a 58% lower risk of death — and four in five were still alive at one year, against about half. The cancer also stayed away far longer (7.4 months against 1.9) and tumours shrank in about a quarter of patients, against just 4% on the single drug. The extra treatment brought extra side effects — about half of patients had a flu-like immune reaction, almost always mild — and there were no treatment-related deaths in the combined group. The results are an interim look, with about 16 months of follow-up so far, but the lead researcher, Dr Jacob Sands of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, says they support the pair as a new standard holding treatment.

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