Two drugs together gave people with the toughest kind of lung cancer eight extra months of life

Small cell lung cancer is the fastest-moving kind of lung cancer, and once it has spread widely, options run out fast. In a trial of 563 people whose cancer had not worsened after chemotherapy, those who also received Amgen's Imdelltra alongside Imfinzi — the standard immune therapy — lived a median of 21.1 months, compared with 12.7 months on Imfinzi alone: a 58% lower risk of death. Nearly 80% of people on the pairing were alive after one year, against 53% on the single drug. Imdelltra works by pulling the body's own immune cells into direct contact with cancer cells so they can destroy them. Serious side effects were more common on the pairing, though about the same share of patients in each group stopped treatment because of them. The full results were presented on Saturday at the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Madrid and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 'Unprecedented in advancing the treatment of extensive-stage small cell lung cancer,' said Amgen's chief medical officer, Paul Burton.

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