Five extra months of life: a stomach-cancer drug doubles survival when other treatments have run out

For people with advanced stomach cancer who have already been through at least two rounds of treatment, options are thin — and time is short. In a late-stage trial of 532 patients presented at the ESMO cancer congress in Madrid on Sunday, AstraZeneca's experimental drug sone-ve — a guided medicine that links a cancer-seeking antibody to a chemotherapy payload — helped patients live a median of 10 months, twice the 5 months on a doctor's choice of standard chemotherapy, a 53% lower risk of death. The drug was tested in patients whose tumours carried a marker called claudin 18.2 at a lower level than the current approved treatment for this target requires, which could roughly double the number of people able to receive this kind of therapy. Honesty matters: the drug did not significantly slow the cancer's growth on a second measure, but serious side effects were less common than on chemotherapy (36.4% against 44.8%), and a study of more than 2,000 patients is already testing it earlier in treatment.

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